|
Charles Sanders Peirce casts a long shadow, at least on the
western side of the Atlantic. His father Benjamin (1809-1880)
|
|
was appointed
a tutor at Harvard in 1829 and made a professor of Mathematics
in the University in 1831. The responsibility was |
|
expanded to astronomy and
mathematics in 1842. He was also director of the US Coast Survey
and the
college librarian. |
|
Curiously, Benjamin's father was also the Harvard librarian and
outlived his son.
Benjamin
the Younger was quite an interesting fellow |
| in his own right: one could
describe
him as America's first research mathematician. We would rather
obliquely touch on some of his |
|
work in associative algebras, and make reference to his methods
for excluding statistical outliers. His work in astronomy
included the |
|
interactions between Uranus and Neptune, the rings of Saturn and
the orbits of comets. In a success story much admired by nerdly |
|
mathematicians, Benjamin the Younger married Sarah Hunt
Mills, a US Senator's daughter, and they had five children. |
|
|
|
Benjamin's publications (found so far) |
| |
| Peirce Manuscripts: Houghton Library,
Harvard University. |
| 1855. Physical and celestial
mathematics, Boston: Little, Brown. |
| 1861. An elementary treatise on plane
and spherical trigonometry, with their applications to
navigation, surveying, heights, and |
| distances, and spherical astronomy, and
particularly adapted to explaining the construction of
Bowditch's navigator, and the nautical |
|
almanac, rev. ed., Boston: J. Munroe. |
| 1870. Linear associative algebra,
Washington (lithograph with a great story behind it). |
| 1880. �The impossible in mathematics�,
in Mrs. J. T. Sargent (ed.), Sketches and reminiscences of the
Radical Club of Chestnut St. |
Boston, Boston : James R. Osgood,
376�379.
|
|
|