Benjamin Peirce

Benjamin Peirce

Born: 4 April 1809 in Salem, Massachusetts, USA
Died: 6 Oct 1880 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

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Benjamin Peirce was a graduate of Harvard and became a tutor there in 1831, two years after graduating. He worked on a wide range of mathematical topics from celestial mechanics and geodesy on the applied side to linear associative algebra and number theory on the pure side.

In an early number theory paper he proved that there is no odd perfect number with fewer than four distinct prime factors. He also revised and wrote a commentary on Bowditch's translation of the first four volumes of Laplace's Traité de mécanique céleste .

Appointed professor at Harvard in 1833 he was to establish the Harvard Observatory. Peirce helped determine the orbit of Neptune (discovered in 1846) and calculated the perturbations produced by Neptune on the orbit of Uranus and on the other planets.

In 1870 Peirce published, at his own expense, Linear Associative Algebra a classification of all complex associative algebras of dimension less than seven. He used the, now familiar, tools of idempotent and nilpotent elements.

Earlier, in 1852, Peirce had introduced methods into the theory of errors applied to observations which would allow faulty observations to be discarded.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Many articles in Amer. Math. Monthly 32 (1925).
  4. R C Archibald, Benjamin Peirce, 1809-1880 (Oberlin, Ohio, 1925).
  5. V F Lenzen, Benjamin Peirce and the U.S. Coast Survey (San Francisco, 1968).
  6. I Bernard Cohen (ed.), Benjamin Peirce : "father of pure mathematics" in America (New York, 1980). 
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JOC/EFR February 1996