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Journal ArticleDOI

Robert Adrain, and the Beginnings of American Mathematics

01 Feb 1926-American Mathematical Monthly (Informa UK Limited)-Vol. 33, Iss: 2, pp 61-76
About: This article is published in American Mathematical Monthly.The article was published on 1926-02-01. It has received 18 citations till now.
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The background of the dispute is sketched, and this little known attack on Gauss in 1820 is presented in translation.

32 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Edward R Hogan1
TL;DR: Adrain this article was a leader in the American mathematical community as a teacher, proposer and solver of problems, and as an editor of mathematical journals, and published two proofs of the exponential law of error independently of Gauss.

14 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Adrain's derivations and applications of the method of least squares in modern terminology were discussed in this article, and the question of the originality of Adrain's work was treated in Section 7.
Abstract: The method of least squares is a very important numerical technique of applied mathematics where it is used for the adjustment of observations, statistical estimation, curve fitting, etc. Publications on the method by A. M. Legendre, Robert Adrain and C. F. Gauss originally appeared in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The rival claims of Legendre and Gauss for priority of discovery generated considerable controversy in the years following. For a long time the relatively unavailable publications of Robert Adrain on the method remained comparatively unknown, but in 1980 they were reprinted in Stigler [1 ; Vol. 1]. The primary purpose of this paper is to present Adrain's derivations and applications of the method of least squares in modern terminology. A sketch of Adrain's mathematical career is given in Section 2. A brief history of the adjustment of observations in the eighteenth century and of the method of least squares is given in Section 3. A surveying problem which was the stimulus for R. Adrain's work on least squares is given in Section 4. Adrain's derivations of the normal law and of the method of least squares are discussed in Section 5 and his applications of the method in Section 6. Finally the question of the originality of Adrain's work is treated in Section 7.

11 citations