Artemas Martin
Artemas Martin (born August 3, 1835 in Steuben County , New York , † November 7, 1918 in Washington, DC ) was an American amateur mathematician.
Life
Martin was the son of farmers and grew up in Venango County , Pennsylvania . He only attended rudimentary school and for a few months the Franklin Academy, where he became interested in mathematics. He wrote articles on mathematical puzzles and problems for magazines and founded two magazines himself: The Mathematical Visitor (1878-1894) and The Mathematical Magazine (1882-1884). His main occupation was in the Pennsylvania countryside as a farmer, oil drill and lumberjack. Occasionally he taught math in schools in the winter. In 1881 he was offered a permanent position as a math teacher, which he turned down, but took a position as a librarian at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, DC in 1885. He himself had an extensive collection of American mathematics textbooks and school books on algebra and arithmetic (5000 books on his death which he bequeathed to the American University , including the 1570 London Euclid edition by Henry Billingsley and the Diophantus edition by Bachet with the comments of Pierre de Fermat from 1670) and published a bibliography about it with JM Greenwood in 1899.
He published only one mathematical work in the narrower sense in the conference proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Chicago in 1893 (on the Diophantine problem of representing a fifth power as the sum of five powers).
He was a member of many national mathematical societies and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1877 he received an honorary degree from Yale University, an honorary doctorate from Rutgers University in 1982 and from Hillsdale College in 1885.
In 1900 he was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris , giving a lecture on a method of calculating logarithms.
literature
- BF Finkel, biography of Martin in: American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 1, 1894, pp. 108-111
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Artemas Martin. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Artemas Martin Collection, American University
Remarks
- ↑ A forerunner of the International Congress of Mathematicians on the occasion of the World's Columbian Exposition
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Martin, Artemas |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 3, 1835 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Steuben County , New York |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 7, 1918 |
| Place of death | Washington, DC |