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Author Thornton, Tamara Plakins, 1957- author.

Title Nathaniel Bowditch and the power of numbers : how a nineteenth-century man of business, science, and the sea changed American life / Tamara Plakins Thornton.

Publication Info. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016]
©2016

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Farmington, Main Library - Adult Department  510.92 THO    Check Shelf
 Manchester, Main Library - Non Fiction  510.92 THORNTON    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  510.92 T39    Check Shelf
Description xiv, 402 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-373) and index.
Summary "Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a mathematician, astronomer, and insurance executive--and a major agent of Enlightenment-era change ... took his personal work habits and blended them with the certainty and predictability of the science that he studied, creating something completely new for his time: the impersonal bureaucracy. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe, Bowditch shaped some of New England's most powerful institutions, from financial corporations to Harvard College, into clockwork mechanisms. He ran his insurance company with rule-bound regularity, implementing systematic and novel paperwork procedures, methodical bookkeeping practices, and standardized filing systems, helping to usher in a new era of intellectual history"-- Provided by publisher.
Subject Bowditch, Nathaniel, 1773-1838.
Astronomers -- United States -- Biography.
Mathematicians -- United States -- Biography.
Industrial organization -- United States -- History.
Astronomy -- history.
Mathematics -- history.
Science -- history.
Bowditch, Nathaniel, 1773-1838. (OCoLC)fst00032420
Astronomers. (OCoLC)fst00819629
Industrial organization. (OCoLC)fst00971405
Mathematicians. (OCoLC)fst01012154
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Genre/Form Biography. (OCoLC)fst01423686
History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
ISBN 9781469626932 (cloth ; alk. paper)
1469626934 (cloth ; alk. paper)
9781469626949 (ebook)
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