| A Ackerberg, Benjamin Peirce,
American National Biography 17 (Oxford, 1999),
250-251. |
| F P Matz, Biography. Benjamin Peirce,
Amer. Math. Monthly 2 (1895), 173-179. |
| P Meier and S Zabell, Benjamin Peirce
and the Howland will, J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 75 (371) (1980),
497-506. |
| S Newcomb, Note on Benjamin Peirce,
Nation 18 (1874), 157. |
| B Peirce, Address of Professor Benjamin
Peirce, President of the American Association for the Year 1853,
The American Association |
| His bachelor's thesis advisor was
Nathaniel Bowditch. Pierce in turn was the advisor on Joseph
Loveridge's BA thesis. |
| [Peirce was later to revise and add
comments to Bowditch's translation of the first four volumes of
Trait de Mecanique Celeste by |
| Pierre-Simon
Laplace. In 1836 Peirce
wrote An Elementary Treatise on Sound, based on the work of
physicist Sir William Herschel. |
| Peirce helped found and organize the
Harvard Observatory, the National Academy of Sciences and the
Sminthsonian Institution. |
| |
| Children |
| |
| 1.
James Mills Peirce (1834�1906), who also taught mathematics at
Harvard and succeeded to his father's professorship. He |
|
graduated from Harvard,
A.B. 1853, A.M., 1856; was a tutor there 1854-58 and 1860-61;
assistant professor of mathematics, 1861-69; |
|
university professor of
mathematics, 1869-85; Perkins professor of astronomy and
mathematics from 1885; secretary of the academic |
|
council, 1872-90;
dean of
the graduate school, 1890-95, and dean of the faculty of arts
and sciences, 1895-98.
His
courses of instruction |
|
at first covered analytic
geometry; calculus;
the
theory of functions and mechanics. Later, he focused on
quaternions; the general theory |
|
of algebraic plane curves
and the rarely used triangular and tetrahedral co-ordinates.
He followed in the family tradition by also
|
|
teaching courses in linear
associative algebra and the elements of the algebra of logic.
He was
elected a member of AAAS, the American |
|
Mathematical Society and a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. |
|
|