Robert Patterson (educator)

Robert Patterson was an Irish-American mathematician, born on 30 May 1743 on a farm near Hillsborough in County Down and dead on 22 July 1824, who directed the United States Mint from 1806 to 1824. He excelled at mathematics as a boy but his family could not afford college, so he joined the militia, emigrated to the Province of Pennsylvania in 1768 and taught at schools before opening a school in Philadelphia for ship captains, one of whose students was the surveyor Andrew Ellicott. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania from 1779 to 1810 and, at the request of Thomas Jefferson, advised Meriwether Lewis on the navigational equipment for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.