BENJAMIN

See also:

• BENJAMIN PEIRCE (1809-188o)

PEIRCE (1809-188o)  , American mathematician and astronomer, was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of April 1809 . Graduating at Harvard College in 1829, he became mathematical tutor there in 1831 and professor in 1833 . He had already assisted Nathaniel Bowditch in his translation of the Mecanique celeste, and now produced a series of mathematical textbooks characterized by the brevity and terseness which made his teaching unattractive to inapt pupils . Young men of talent, on the contrary, found his instruction most stimulating, and after Bowditch's death in 1838 Peirce stood first among American mathematicians . His researches into the perturbations of Uranus and Neptune (Prot . Amer . Acad., 1848) gave him a wider fame; he became in 1849 consulting astronomer to the American Nautical Almanac, and for this work prepared new tables of the moon (1852) . A discussion of the equilibrium of Saturn's rings led him to conclude in 1855 that they must be of a fluid nature . From 1867 to 1874 he was superintendent of the Coast Survey . In 1857 he published his best known work, the System of Analytical Mechanics, which was, however, surpassed in brilliant originality by his Linear Associative Algebra (lithographed privately in a few copies, 187o; reprinted in the Amer . Journ . Math., 1882) .

He died at

Cambridge, Mass., on the 6th of October 1880 . See New Amer . Cyclopae.dia (Ripley and Dana), vol. xiii . (1861) ; T . J . J . See, Popular Astronomy, iii . 49; Nature, xxii . 607; R . Grant, Hist. of Phys . Astronomy, pp . 205, 292; J .

C .

Poggendorff, Biog. lit . Handworterbuch; Month . Notices Roy . Astr . Society, xli . 191 .