NATHANIEL

BOWDITCH (1773-1838)  , American mathe- matician, was born at Salem, Massachusetts . He was bred to his father's business as a cooper, and afterwards apprenticed to a ship-chandler . His taste for mathematics early developed itself; and he acquired Latin that he might study Newton's Principia . As clerk (1795) and then as supercargo (1796, 1798, 1799) he made four long voyages; and, being an excellent navigator, he afterwards (1802) commanded a vessel, instructing his crews in lunar and other observations . He edited two editions of Hamilton Moore's Navigation, and in 1802 published a valuable work, New American Practical Navigator, founded on the earlier treatise by Moore . In 1804 he became president of a Salem insurance company . In the midst of his active career he undertook a translation of the Mecanique celeste of P . S . Laplace, with valuable annotations (vol. i., 1829) . He was offered, but declined, the professorship of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard . Subsequently he became president of the Mechanics' Institute in-Boston, and also of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He died at Boston on the 16th of March 1838 .

A

life of Bowditch was written by his son Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch (1805—1861), and was prefixed to the fou2th volume (1839) of the translation of Laplace . In 1865 this was elaborated into a separate biography by another son, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (1808-1892), a famous Boston physician .