Benjamin Peirce

Benjamin Peirce (1809 to 1880) was an American mathematician born in Salem, Massachusetts, who spent his whole career at Harvard, where he held the Perkins Professorship of Mathematics and Astronomy from 1842 until his death. His research ranged from celestial mechanics and geodesy to number theory and linear associative algebra. He proved that no odd perfect number can have fewer than four distinct prime factors, helped determine the orbit of Neptune, and in 1870 published Linear Associative Algebra, a classification of the complex associative algebras of dimension less than seven, in which he introduced the terms idempotent and nilpotent. He directed the United States Coast Survey from 1867 to 1874 and was a founder member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been called the Father of pure mathematics in America, and his son Charles Sanders Peirce became a noted logician.