The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course

5. NORTH AMERICA 63

still puny compared with the schools in Germany, Britain, France, and Italy. Even

as late as 1940, only about half a dozen mathematical journals were published in

the United States. The United States vaulted to a position of world leadership

in mathematics following World War II, and it has remained among the strongest

nations in this area, thanks to its possession of a powerful university system and

equally well-developed professional organizations such as the American Mathemat-

ical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the Society for Industrial

and Applied Mathematics, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,

together with over 100 professional journals devoted to mathematics in general or

specific areas within it.

5.1. The United States and Canada before 1867. Until the late nineteenth

century most of the mathematics done in North America was purely practical, and

to find more than one or two examples of its practitioners we shall have to leave

mathematics proper and delve into related areas. Nevertheless, one can find a few

examples of Americans who practiced mathematics for its own sake, even in the

eighteenth century.

David Rittenhouse. Like his younger brother Benjamin (1740-1825), David Ritten-

house (1732-1796) was primarily a manufacturer of compasses and clocks. He made

two compasses for George Washington. He also got involved in surveying and in

1763 helped to settle a border dispute between William Penn and Lord Baltimore.

He became the first director of the United States Mint by appointment of President

Washington in 1792, and he became president of the American Philosophical Soci-

ety in 1791, after the death of Benjamin Franklin. According to Homann (1987),

he was self-taught in mathematics, but enjoyed calculation very much and so was

able to read Newton's Principia on his own. He developed a continued-fraction

method of approximating the logarithm of a positive number, described in detail

by Homann. Like the Japanese tradition of challenge problems, some of Ritten-

house's papers asked for proofs of results the author himself had not been able to

supply. In one case this challenge was taken up by Nathaniel Bowditch (discussed

below).

Robert Adrain. An immigrant of great mathematical talent—he came to the United

States from his native Ireland after being wounded by friendly fire in the rebellion of

1798--was Robert Adrain (1775-1843). He taught at Princeton until 1800, when he

moved to York, Pennsylvania; in 1804 he moved again, to Reading, Pennsylvania.

He contributed to, and in 1807 became editor of, the Mathematical Correspondent,

the first mathematical research journal in the United States. Parshall (2000, p. 381)

has noted that even as late as 1874 "[t]here were no journals in the United States

devoted to mathematical research, and, in fact, up to that time all attempts to

sustain such publication outlets had failed almost immediately." The Mathematical

Correspondent appears to have ended with the first issue of Vol. 2, that is, the

first one edited by Adrain. In an interesting article on the original editor of the

Mathematical Correspondent, George Baron (b. 1769, date of death unknown), V.

Fred Rickey notes that perhaps it may not have been merely the American ignorance

of mathematics that led to an early demise for this journal. Rickey points out that

the journal had 347 subscribers and published 487 copies of its first issue, but that

an article in The Analyst in 1875 (2, No. 5, 131-138) by one David S. Hart contains

the following interesting comment: