Investigated in this paper are the initial stages of the laminar, two-dimensional, thermal-fluid problem of forced and mixed convective heat transfer from accelerated flow past an elliptic cylinder. The cylinder is taken to be inclined at an angle eta with the horizontal and the viscous incompressible Boussinesq fluid accelerates uniformly from rest past it. Two types of solutions are presented. The first type takes the form of an approximate analytical solution valid for small times and large Reynolds numbers. The second type is a numerical solution obtained by numerically integrating the full Navier-Stokes and energy equations using a spectral-finite difference procedure. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.