Peirce, Benjamin

Peirce, Benjamin, 1809–80, American mathematician and astronomer, b. Salem, Mass., grad. Harvard, 1829. From 1833 he was a professor at Harvard; he helped establish the Harvard Observatory and was an organizer of the Dudley Observatory, Albany, N.Y. In the field of mechanics he made studies of the forms of elastic sacs containing fluids. From 1867 to 1874 he was superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey. He was the father of Charles Sanders Peirce. His fundamental contributions to mathematics were collected as Linear Associative Algebra (1870). He also wrote A System of Analytic Mechanics (1855).

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Peirce, Benjamin (1809–80) astronomer, mathematician; born in Salem, Mass. (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 U.S. 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—but 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.