biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1809–80)
|
| biography:
| Astronomer and mathematician, born in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, the father of Charles Sanders Peirce. Encouraged by Nathaniel Bowditch as a youth, he went on to become a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard (1833–80), founder of the Harvard Observatory (1843), and an organizer of the Smithsonian Institution (1847). He was a consulting astronomer to the American Nautical Almanac(1849–67) and was affiliated with the US Coast Survey (1852–74, superintendent from 1867), with which he organized several expeditions. Most of his many publications dealt with astronomy, mechanics, and geodesy, including his corrected revision (1829–39) of Bowditch's translation of Laplace's work on celestial mechanics. His major contribution was to American mathematics, in part through his publications such as Linear Associative Algebra (1870), but more importantly as a teacher who inspired generations of other young mathematicians. |
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