Robert Adrain

Robert Adrain (30 September 1775 – 10 August 1843) was an Irish political exile who won renown as a mathematician in the United States. He left Ireland after leading republican insurgents in the Rebellion of 1798, and settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. With Nathaniel Bowditch, he shares the distinction of being the first scholar to publish original mathematical research in America. This included his formulation of the method of least squares while working on a surveying problem (in two proofs of the exponential law of error published independently of Carl Friedrich Gauss) for which he is chiefly remembered. His fields of applied mathematical interest included physics, astronomy and geodesy. Many of his mathematical investigations focussed on the shape of the Earth.

Biography

Adrain was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland. His father, of French Huguenot descent, was a school teacher and maker of mathematical instruments, and he apparently received a good education until he was fifteen when both his parents died. He then supported himself and his four siblings by assuming his father's position as a teacher and as a private tutor. In the confrontation with British Crown forces, he was near fatally wounded by one of his own men. After being nursed back to health, with a bounty on his head he, his wife and infant child escaped to America. the first volume of the Analyst has been considered "the best collection of mathematical work produced in the United States up to that time". As well as from Adrain, it included contributions from Nathaniel Bowditch, Robert Patterson, John Gummere and Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. and the next year, when he took a position at Columbia, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1827 he was Professor of Mathematics in the University of Pennsylvania

In 1825, he founded a somewhat more successful publication targeting a wider readership, The Mathematical Diary, which was published through 1832.

In 1834, Adrain was asked to resign from the University of Pennsylvania on grounds of class ill-discipline (instances of students overturning benches and throwing eggs). He returned to New Brunswick. He rented a school room and offered private tutoring until 1836. Local records in New Brunswick indicate that during the 1830s, he held in slavery a woman named Caroline and her son Alfred. After 1836, he returned to New York and taught at the Columbia College Grammar School before retiring to New Brunswick in 1840 where three years later he died.

Adrain was the father of Congressman Garnett B. Adrain. He is commemorated by a blue plaque, unveiled at Carrickfergus by the Ulster History Circle.

Biography

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