Bowditch, Nathaniel

Bowditch, Nathaniel (1773–1838), astronomer and mathematician.Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Bowditch ended his formal education at age ten. Between 1795 and 1803 he made five voyages on merchant ships, serving on the last voyage as master and part owner. He became head of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company in 1804. In 1823, he became actuary of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company of Boston, a position he held until his death.

Self‐educated, Bowditch mastered mathematics, celestial mechanics, French, and German, and familiarized himself with the scientific research underway in Europe. Although initially known for his New American Practical Navigator (1802), a manual for mariners, he also published extensively on celestial mechanics, mathematics, and physics, establishing himself as the leading American celestial mechanician and mathematician of the first quarter of the nineteenth century and becoming one of the few American men of science with an international reputation.

Bowditch's greatest contribution to American science, however, was his translation and annotation of Pierre Simon Laplace's Traite de mécanique céleste (1799–1825), a five‐volume summary of the progress of physical astronomy since Isaac Newton. Between 1814 and 1817 Bowditch translated into English and annotated the four volumes published to that point. Publication of Bowditch's work began in 1829 and was completed posthumously in 1839. Adding the missing steps in Laplace's demonstrations, reporting recent improvements and discoveries in mathematics, and providing the sources from which Laplace had drawn, Bowditch's commentary proved crucial in the education of the next generation of American astronomers and mathematicians.
See also Insurance; Mathematics and Statistics; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

Henry Ingersoll Bowditch , Memoir of Nathaniel Bowditch, 1839.
John C. Greene , American Science in the Age of Jefferson, 1984.

Marc Rothenberg