64 3. MATHEMATICAL CULTURES IIThe writer has a copy of No. 2. stitched in a blue cover, on which is
an advertisement of a Lecture delivered in New York by G. Baron,
which contains (as he says) "a complete refutation of the false
and spurious principles, ignorantly imposed on the public, in the
'New American Practical Navigator,' written by N. Bowditch and
published by E.M. Blunt." The sub-editors endorsing the above
say, "We agree with the author that he has shown in the most
incontrovertible manner, that the principles on which the 'New
American Practical Navigator' is founded, are universally false,
and gross impositions on the public."
Since Bowditch was, next to Adrain, the strongest mathematician in the coun-
try at the time, this sort of internecine feuding could only have been harmful to
the development of a community of mathematicians. Rickey's article can be found
by following links from the following website.
http://www.dean.usma.edu/math/people/rickey/Adrain is best remembered for discovering, independently of Legendre and
Gauss, the theory of least-squares and the normal (Gaussian) distribution. How-
ever, given the low state of science in general in the United States, it is not surpris-
ing that no one in Europe noticed Adrain's work. Kowalewski (1950, pp. 84-85)
notes that the Gottingen astronomer Tobias Mayer (1723 1762) had used a similar
method as early as 1748.
Commerce requires a certain amount of mathematics and astronomy to meet
the needs of navigation, and all the early American universities taught dialing (the-
ory of the sundial), astronomy, and navigation. These subjects were standard,
long-known mathematics, a great contrast to the rapid pace of innovation in Eu-
rope at this period. Nevertheless, to write the textbooks of navigation and calculate
the tides a year in advance required some ability. It is remarkable that this knowl-
edge was acquired by two Americans who were not given even the limited formal
education that could be obtained at an American university. Although neither
was a mathematician in the strict sense, both of them understood and used the
mathematics of astronomy.
Benjamin Banneker. In the fall of 1791 the Baltimore publishing house of William
Goddard and James Angell published a book bearing the title Banneker's Almanac
and Ephemeris for the Year of our Lord 1792.... The author, Benjamin Banneker
(1731-1806), was 60 years old at the time, the only child of parents of African
descent^9 who had left him a small parcel of land as an inheritance. For most of his
life Banneker lived near Baltimore, struggling as a poor farmer with a rudimentary
formal education. Nevertheless, he acquired a reputation for cleverness due to
his skill in arithmetic. In middle age he made the acquaintance of the Ellicotts, a
prominent local family, who lent him a few books on astronomy. From these meager
materials Banneker was able to construct an almanac for the year 1791. Encouraged
by this success, he prepared a similar almanac for 1792. In that year the Ellicotts
put him in contact with James McHenry (who had been Surgeon General of the
American Army during the Revolutionary War). McHenry wrote to the editors:
(^9) Banneker's grandmother was an Englishwoman who married one of her slaves. Their daughter
Mary, Banneker's mother, also married a slave, who had the foresight to purchase a farm jointly
in his own name and in the name of his son Benjamin.