Simon Newcomb

Simon Newcomb was a Canadian-American astronomer, applied mathematician and autodidactic polymath, born in Nova Scotia in 1835. At nineteen he left an apprenticeship to join his father, who was teaching in Massachusetts, and although he had little conventional schooling he completed a Bachelor of Science at Harvard in 1858. He served as Professor of Mathematics in the United States Navy and at Johns Hopkins University and made important contributions to timekeeping and to other fields of applied mathematics, such as economics and statistics. Fluent in several languages, he also wrote popular science books and a science fiction novel.