Warren Colburn

Warren Colburn (1793 to 1833) was an American mathematics educator and mill manager, born in Dedham, Massachusetts, to a poor family. He learned the machinist trade, entered Harvard in 1816 and graduated in 1820. His reputation rests on First Lessons in Intellectual Arithmetic, published in 1821, a textbook that taught children to reason about numbers through questions and mental work rather than memorised rules, and which sold more widely than any earlier elementary arithmetic. It was translated into most European languages and several Eastern ones. He followed it with a Sequel in 1824 and an Algebra in 1827. He also ran mills at Waltham and Lowell, patented improvements in machinery, and gave popular science lectures.