Robert Adrain

Robert Adrain (30 September 1775 – 10 August 1843) was an Irish political exile who won renown as a mathematician in the United States. He left Ireland after leading republican insurgents in the Rebellion of 1798, and settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. With Nathaniel Bowditch, he shares the distinction of being the first scholar to publish original mathematical research in America. This included his formulation of the method of least squares while working on a surveying problem (in two proofs of the exponential law of error published independently of Carl Friedrich Gauss) for which he is chiefly remembered. His fields of applied mathematical interest included physics, astronomy and geodesy. Many of his mathematical investigations focussed on the shape of the Earth. Biography Adrain was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland. His father, of French Huguenot descent, was a school teacher and maker of mathematical instruments, and he apparently received a good education until he was fifteen when both his parents died. He then supported himself and his four siblings by assuming his father's position as a teacher and as a private tutor. In the cause of democratic reform and national independence, on 7 June 1798 he led a contingent of United Irishmen in the rebel army commanded by Henry Joy McCracken at the Battle of Antrim. In the confrontation with British Crown forces, he was near fatally wounded by one of his own men. After being nursed back to health, with a bounty on his head he, his wife and infant child escaped to America. Although he was himself largely self-taught in mathematics, he secured a teaching position at the academy at Princeton, New Jersey. In 1801 he became president of the York County Academy in York, Pennsylvania. He wrote for the Mathematical Correspondent (edited by George Baron), the first mathematical journal in the United States, contributing the first article published in America on diophantine algebra. Later he twice attempted, in 1808 and 1814, to found his own journal, The Analyst, or, Mathematical Museum. While he failed to attract sufficient subscribers, the first volume of the Analyst has been considered "the best collection of mathematical work produced in the United States up to that time". As well as from Adrain, it included contributions from Nathaniel Bowditch, Robert Patterson, John Gummere and Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. Recognition followed.