Math Department (History)

The Jackson Years: 1826 - 1877

During the period from 1826 to 1877, the department contained, and for much of the time consisted of, Isaac Jackson. An 1826 graduate of Union, Jackson was an active publisher of textbooks himself - books on mechanics, optics, conic sections and trigonometry as well as notes on acoustics and electricity (his prescience evident there), magnetism and mineralogy bore his name. Although Jackson seems not to have sought to make any original contributions to mathematics, he maintained a lifelong friendship with the noted physicist Joseph Henry, and his texts and notes are evidence of his energy and love of mathematics and the teaching of it. Jackson was, as were many of the early faculty across the College, a man of many parts, as the article about him in this Dictionary attests. He retired in 1877, a year before Joseph Sylvester founded the first graduate program in mathematics in this country, at Johns Hopkins.

William Gillespie, a Columbia graduate, came to Union in 1845 as its first Lecturer in Civil Engineering. It is important to note that he also served for most of the rest of his career as Adjunct Professor of Mathematics. Gillespie not only stressed the importance of mathematics in engineering, he began a tradition of emphasizing the humanities for the engineers as well; this is a tradition that the College has wisely preserved to this day, to its enormous benefit. Gillespie was a poet, as well as the author of two successful textbooks, one on road-making, the other on surveying. It was through his efforts that the College acquired its copies of the Olivier models, which demonstrate three-dimensional surfaces by stringing threads on brass and wooden frames; these are now displayed prominently in the Science and Engineering Center, after having been restored during the 1970's by Prof. William C. Stone. Stone's monograph describes the models in detail.

Gillespie's influence doubtless contributed to the study of mathematics at Union in its familiar role as "handmaiden of the sciences". The Catalogue in 1882-83 listed, among many other things, a course in quaternions, which at the time was right at the frontier of mathematical research, and involved some of the biggest names in American mathematics (for example, Sylvester on one side and J. Willard Gibbs of Yale on the other). Although a comment in Concordiensis in November, 1880, claiming that only at Union and Johns Hopkins are courses in quaternions taught on this side of the Atlantic is probably an exaggeration, still the subject was in the air, and it is remarkable to find a course in that area, necessarily "voluntary", taught at a small college. It is also worth noting that during the period 1883-1901, a series of papers on quaternions appeared under the pen of Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

Math Department web pages
Created: 06 Mar 1997
Last modified: 09 Oct 1999 00:00:00
Comments to: math@union.edu