Abstract
WE regret to have to record the death at Cambridge, Mass., on October 6, of Prof. Peirce of Harvard University, following upon an illness of three months from Bright's disease. Prof. Peirce was the son of a former librarian of the university, Benjamin Peirce, who died in 1831. For the past thirty-five years he has occupied a professorship at Harvard; and as a lecturer, author, thinker, and investigator, has not only ranked amongst the first of a numerous corps of professors, but also among the first of American men of science. Devoting himself originally to mathematics, Prof. Peirce has successively pursued exhaustive studies in all the branches more closely allied to mathematics, and has obtained eminence equally in physics, astronomy, mechanics, and navigation. His numerous investigations in these various departments, while read before various scientific societies, have been published, unfortunately, for the most part in the briefest possible form, and the results of many of his researches are to be found only in the manuals he published on various subjects. As an author Prof. Peirce was highly esteemed upon both sides of the Atlantic, his work on analytical mechanics, which appeared in 1857, being regarded then even in Germany as the best of its kind. His chief works are a “Treatise on Algebra,” a “Treatise on Plane and Solid Geometry,” “Pure Mathematics,” a “Treatise on Sound,” “Ocean Lanes for Steamships,” “Tables of the Moon,” “System of Analytic Mechanics,” “Potential Physics,” “Linear Associative Algebra,” “Analytic Morphology,” and “Criterion for the Rejection of Doubtful Observations.” As a lecturer Prof. Peirce was highly esteemed in both scientific and popular circles. It is related that in 1843, by a series of popular lectures on astronomy, he so excited the public interest that the necessary funds were supplied for erecting an observatory at Harvard. A remarkable series of lectures on “Ideality in Science,” delivered by him in 1879 before the Lowell Institute in Boston, attracted the general attention of American thinkers, on account of the thoughtful consideration of the vexed question of science and religion.
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Benjamin Peirce, F.R.S . Nature 22, 607–608 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022607g0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022607g0