Subject: Re: [HM] American mathematicians
From: Don Cook (tdctdc@surfsouth.com)
Date: Fri May 12 2000 - 19:51:14 EDT
Dear All,
I know that we've been through the mathematical ability of US Presidents,
but one more article. A story which may not be true is that Thomas Jefferson
named the mathematican David Rittenhouse as one of the three most
intellegent men in America. (Franklin was one of the other two - I forget
the third)
I've included an article on Jefferson's mathematical ability.
Of course, one hardly needs an expensive education in Newtonian mathematics
at William and Mary College to do that. But another of Jefferson's ventures
truly shows the benefits of a Newtonian education.
Travelling through France fifteen years later, in 1788, he noticed peasants
near Nancy ploughing, and fell to wondering about the design of the
moldboard, that is, the surface which turns the earth: he spent the next
ten years working on this, on and off, wondering how to achieve the most
efficient design, both offering least frictional resistance, and which also
would be easy for farmers out in the frontiers to construct, far from
technical help. He consulted the Pennsylvania mathematician Robert
Patterson (born in Ireland in 1743), and consulted also another
Philadelphia luminary, the self-taught astronomer and mathematical
instrument-maker David Rittenhouse (1732-1796). It transpired that the
answer lay in one of Jefferson's old college textbooks, Emerson's Doctrine
of Fluxions, in material deriving from the discussion of 'solids of least
resistance' in Newton's Principia, Book ii. Jefferson's account appeared in
the 1799 volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,
of which he was president by this time. This is quite a good example of
Newtonian mathematics in action, its perhaps surprising applicability to
frontier needs, and of Jefferson's command of it. The most important thing
isn't so much his solving the problem as his coming to see that there was a
connection between his mathematical studies at William and Mary College and
the furthering of frontier agriculture: that mathematics was the kind of
thing to bear on the problems of farmers in the new country.
http://www.math.virginia.edu/Jefferson/ see jeff_r(3).htm
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