biography
pronunciation:
[megz]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1757–1822)
|
| biography:
| Lawyer, educator, and public official, born in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He studied at Yale (1778) and returned there as a tutor (1781–4), meanwhile helping to launch and edit the New Haven Gazette (1784–8), which published the ‘Hartford Wits’. Admitted to the bar (1783), he practised law in Bermuda for several years before becoming professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale (1794). Disputatious and difficult, he left Yale for the presidency of the University of Georgia (1801) and was not lamented when he resigned that office in 1810. Appointed surveyor general of the USA (1812), he was a founder of the Columbian Institute, later George Washington University. |
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