John Farrar (scientist)

John Farrar (1779 to 1853) was an American scholar who held the Hollis Professorship of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University from 1807 until he resigned in 1836 because of a painful illness. After graduating from Harvard in 1803 and serving as Greek tutor, he reformulated the mathematical curriculum and introduced modern mathematics there, preparing the Cambridge mathematical series and translating European works for American undergraduates, among them Lacroix's Elements of Algebra in 1818, followed by selections from Legendre, Biot and others. Harvard, the U.S. military academy and other institutions adopted these books as textbooks. He also kept weather records at Cambridge, Massachusetts between 1807 and 1817 and described the hurricane of 23 September 1815 as a moving vortex, an observation that led to his being credited with a concept of hurricanes. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1808.