Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 08.djvu/275

 PEIRCE

PEIRCE

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versity, 1831-33 ; universit\- professor of mathe- matics and natural philosophy, 1833-42, and Per- kins professor of astronomy and mathematics, 1842-80. He was married, July 23, 1833, to Sarah Hunt, daughter of Elijah Hunt and Harriette (Blake) Mills of Northampton, Mass. While still a schoolboy he evinced decided orig- inal powers in the field of mathematics, and attracted the no- tice of his townsman, Nathaniel Bow ditch (q.v.), to whom he owed much during the period of his youth and early man- hood, for instruc- tion, counsel, friendly encouragement and backing. While still an undergraduate at Harvard college, he assisted Dr. Bowditch in reading the proof- sheets of the latter's translation of Laplace's " Mecanique Celeste," with its learned commen- tary, added by the translator. He was rather a worker and an investigator than a teacher, a large share of his study and labor being given to astro- nomy and later to cosinical physics and geodesy. For several years, about 1840, he took part in the actual night work of the old college observatory. He paid much attention to the theory of comets, and his lecture on the great comet of 1843 stimu- lated public interest in astronomy, and led to the foundation of the present Harvard observatory. His discussion in 1846 and 1847 of the discovery of Neptune and its relation to the labors of Lever- rier made him known to the scientific world. He was consulting astronomer to the American Eplie- meris and Nautical Almanac from its founda- tion in 1849 to 1867. He was with Joseph Henry and Alexander Dallas Bache, a member of the scientific council that organized the Dudley ob- servatory, under the direction of Dr. B. A. Gould, at Albany, N.Y,, in 1855. He had charge of the longitude determinations of the U.S. coast sur- vey, 1852-67, and on the death of Alexander D. Bache, succeeded him as superintendent of the survey in 1867, holding that office until 1874, at the same time retaining his professorship. He carried out Bache's plans for a great geodetic system extending from the Atlantic to the Gulf, thus laying the foundation for a general map of the United States, and he also superintended the work of measuring the arc of the parallel of 39 degrees to join the Atlantic and Pacific system of triangulation and for determining geographical positions in states where surveys were being made.

He was in charge of the American expedition to Sicily to make observations on the eclipse of the sun in 1870, and organized two expeditious to ob- sei've the transit of Venus in 1874. Under his superintendency the name of the " Coast Survey " was altered to " Coast and Geodetic Survey," and its great function in unifying and helping for- ward the scientific enterprise of the country was raised to even a higher point than it had attained under Bache. He was a contributor to the pro- ceedings of the American Association for the Ad- vancement of Science ; to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and to the National Acad- emy of Sciences. The earlier volumes of Gould's Astronomical Journal contain several important papers from his hand. Among the subjects which he illuminated for his contemporaries, and on which, in some instances, portions of his work are in print, are : Espy's Theory of Storms ; the orbit of Neptune, and the perturbations of Ura- nus ; the general theory of perturbations ; the theory of Comets and Comets' Tails ; the Con- stitution of Saturn's Rings; the Meteoric Con- stitution of the Solar System and the Universe ; the Nebular Theory ; the Cooling of the Earth and the Sun ; the occultations of the Pleiades ; an ingenious and remarkable Criterion for the rejec- tion of Doubtful Observations ; Personal Equa- tion ; the motion of a Sling, a study in stable and unstable equilibrium ; the theory of the Billiard Ball ; the motions of two Pendulums attached to the same horizontal cord ; the forms of stable equilibrium of a fluid enclosed in an extensible sack, and floating in another fluid, — an investiga- tion in Morphology ; the so-called School-Girl Puzzle, an interesting and difiicult problem in cyclic permutation, which he generalized, and of which, in its generalized form, he put forth an able solution. His most elaborate writing was the treatise entitled Analytic Mechanics, of which the first two hundred pages appeared in 1855, and the complete volume (496 pp.) in 1857.

In this work, he sought " to consolidate

the latest researches of the great geometers

and their most exalted forms of thought

into a consistent and uniform treatise." At the time of its publication it was the most important mathematical treatise that had been produced in America. While he was still engaged upon his treatise, he became interested in Hamilton's great calculus of Quaternions, and his study of this subject led him to enter upon an enquiry into the possible systems of multiple algebra and the conditions by which they are determined. The enquiry resulted in his memoir on Linear Associative Algebra communicated to the Na- tional Academy of Sciences in 1870, issued in that year for private circulation, and first printed in 1881, under the editorship of his son, Charles S,