Nathaniel Bowditch

Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation, born in Salem on 26 March 1773 and dead on 16 March 1838, and often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation. His book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on every commissioned United States Naval vessel. The son of a cooper, he left school at ten to work in the cooperage and was indentured at twelve as a bookkeeping apprentice to a ship chandler; at fourteen he began to study algebra, two years later he taught himself calculus, and he learned Latin and French to read Newton's Principia. He found thousands of errors in John Hamilton Moore's Practical Navigator and translated Laplace's Mécanique céleste.