Robert Adrain

Robert Adrain (born September 30, 1775 in Carrickfergus , † August 10, 1843 in New Brunswick ) was an American mathematician.

Adrain was the son of a teacher. As a mathematician, he was essentially self-taught. At the age of 15 he lost his parents and looked after his siblings as a school teacher. He was successful in this, so that he was able to get married in 1798. The marriage had seven children. He took part as an officer on the side of the United Irishman in the 1798 uprising, was wounded and emigrated to the USA, where he settled in Princeton. There he was a teacher at Princeton Academy and from 1800 director (Principal) of the York County Academy in York (Pennsylvania) . He was one of the lead authors of the Mathematical Correspondent , founded in 1804 , the first mathematical journal in the United States. Editor was George Baron and from 1807 Adrain, which he gave up after a year in favor of his own magazine The Analyst . This journal also only existed for a short time, as mathematical life in the USA was hardly developed at that time (another prominent mathematician was Nathaniel Bowditch ).

In 1805 he was headmaster at the Academy in Reading (Pennsylvania) and from 1809 to 1813 he was a mathematics professor at Queen's College in New Brunswick, now Rutgers University . From 1813 to 1826 he taught at Columbia College (later Columbia University ) in New York. He was then back at Rutgers College in New Brunswick and from 1828 to 1834 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Vice Provost, but was asked to leave after he could not maintain the discipline in his classes and probably at too high a level taught.

In his contributions to the Mathematical Correspondent he dealt, among other things, with number theory, the earth figure (with an improved value of the flattening compared to Pierre Simon de Laplace ), the chain line and with the method of least squares . In 1808 he published (before Carl Friedrich Gauß ) on the normal distribution.

He founded some of the earliest mathematical journals in the United States, The Analyst in 1808 and 1814, which only existed briefly, and in 1825 the more popular science journal Mathematical Diary , which lasted seven years.

Neglected manuscripts by Adrain were examined by MJ Babb of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s, but have been lost after his death in 1945.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society .

literature

• Dirk Struik , article Robert Adrain in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• Julian L. Coolidge : Robert Adrain and the beginning of American mathematics, Amer. Math. Monthly, Vol. 33, 1926, pp. 61-76.
• J. Dutka: Robert Adrain and the method of least squares, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci., Vol. 41, 1990, pp. 171-184.
• ER Hogan: Robert Adrain: American mathematician, Historia Math., Vol. 4, 1977, pp. 157-172.
• Karen Parshall , David E. Rowe : he Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community, 1876-1900, AMS 1994

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Robert Adrain. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .