PEIRCE
PEIRCE
(^;
^
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,
