66 3. MATHEMATICAL CULTURES II
cooper, a trade that barely provided for his family of seven children. Nathaniel
received only a rudimentary public education before being apprenticed to a ship
chandler at the age of 10. Twelve years later, when Banneker's Almanac had been
published for only a year or two, he signed on board a ship and, like Banneker,
used his few intervals of leisure to study mathematics and astronomy. Bowditch
was a natural teacher who enthusiastically shared his knowledge of navigation with
his shipmates. With his aptitude for mathematics, he managed to get through
Newton's Principia, learning a considerable amount of Latin on the way. Later he
taught himself French, which had displaced Latin as the language of science as a
result of the pre-eminence of French mathematicians and scientists.
Bowditch first gained a scholarly reputation by pointing out errors in the stan-
dard navigational tables. His abilities immediately attracted interest, and his Prac-
tical Navigator, first published in 1800, gained him wide recognition^10 while he was
still in his twenties. Bowditch became a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, and in 1818 was elected a member of the Royal Society. With recogni-
tion came leisure time to devote to purely scholarly pursuits, a luxury denied to Ban-
neker in his most vigorous years. For the last quarter-century of his life Bowditch
labored on his monumental translation and commentary of the Mecanique celeste by
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). This work amounts really to a complete rewrit-
ing of Laplace's treatise, which shows the effects of a pronounced stinginess with
ink and paper. Bowditch filled in all the missing details of arguments that Laplace
had merely waved his hand at, not having the patience to write down arguments
that had sometimes taken him weeks to discover. These pursuits brought Bowditch
international fame, and he died covered with honors. The American Journal of
Science published his obituary with a portrait of him in a classical Roman tunic
which it is unlikely he ever actually wore.
5.2. The Canadian Federation and post Civil War United States. The
end of the American Civil War in 1865 was followed closely by the founding of the
Canadian Federation in 1867. The Federation was the result of the North America
Act, which reserved some constitutional controls for Britain. Full independence
came in 1982. From that time on, both countries experienced a cultural flowering,
which included advances in mathematics. Americans and Canadians began to go to
Europe to learn advanced mathematics. This early generation of European-trained
mathematicians generally found no incentive to continue research upon returning
home. However, they at least made the curriculum more sophisticated and prepared
the way for the next generation.
In Europe there were more Ph.D. mathematicians being produced than the uni-
versities could absorb. Most of these entered other professions, but a few emigrated
across the Atlantic. A scholarly coup was scored by Johns Hopkins University, which
opened in 1876 with a first-rate mathematician on board, James Joseph Sylvester.
Despite being 62 years old, Sylvester was still a creative algebraist, whose presence
in America attracted international attention. One of his first acts was to found the
first mathematical research journal in the United States, the American Journal of
Mathematics. The founding of this journal had been suggested by William Edward
Story (1850-1930), one of many Americans who went abroad to get the Ph.D. de-
gree but, atypically, continued to do mathematical research after returning to the
United States. Before Johns Hopkins was founded, there had been a few graduate
And apparently some detractors associated with the Mathematical Correspondent (see above).