Skip to content
Simon Newcomb

File:Simon_Newcomb_01.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

EntityQ164401· pop 47· linked from 551 articles

Simon Newcomb

Sign in to save

American astronomer (1835–1909)

OverviewAI-generated

Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) was an American male figure associated with the United States. His recorded works include *A B C of Finance*, *Astronomy for Everybody*, *Reminiscences of an Astronomer*, *Popular Astronomy*, and *Fairyland of Geometry and Other Essays in Science*. He is recognized in the Royal Society collection and the American Academy Arts Sciences collection.

MusicBrainz lists him as a person with genres including cool jazz, jazz, and swing. Open Library records 37 works under his name, while Crossref lists five works and Europeana Sparql lists one. He is referenced by 551 other encyclopedia articles.

Synthesized by Vinony from 20 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, Europeana Sparql, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works
37

Top works

  • a B C of Finance
  • Astronomy for Everybody
  • Reminiscences of an Astronomer
  • Popular Astronomy
  • Compendium of Spherical Astronomy with Its Applications to the Determination and Reduction of Positions of the Fixed Stars

via Open Library + Wikidata

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
10
Total plays
57

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Simon+Newcomb">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Simon Newcomb

Quotes

  • Is the Airship Possible? That depends, first of all, on whether we are to make the requisite scientific discoveries... the construction of an aerial vehicle ... which could carry even a single man from place-to-place at pleasure requires the discovery of some new metal or some new force.
  • One of the most curious of these cases [geometrical paradoxers] was that of a student, I am not sure but a graduate, of the University of Virginia, who claimed that geometers were in error in assuming that a line had no thickness. He published a school geometry based on his views, which received the endorsement of a well-known New York school official and, on the basis of this, was actually endorsed, or came very near being endorsed, as a text-book hi the public schools of New York.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
( 1835-03-12 ) March 12, 1835, Wallace, Nova Scotia , Canada
Died
July 11, 1909 (1909-07-11) (aged 74), Washington, D.C. , U.S.
Citizenship
American
Alma mater
Harvard University ( BS , 1858)
Spouse
Mary Caroline Hassler ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. August 4, 1863</span>"}]]}'>1863 ) ​
Children
4, including Anita and Josepha
Awards
Copley Medal (1890) , Bruce Medal (1898)
Fields
Astronomy , Mathematics
Academic advisors
Benjamin Peirce
Doctoral students
Henry Ludwell Moore

via Wikipedia infobox

Works in European collections

1 object attributed to Simon Newcomb, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana

~20 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Simon Newcomb (March 12, 1835 – July 11, 1909) was a Canadian–American astronomer, applied mathematician, and autodidactic polymath. He served as Professor of Mathematics in the United States Navy and at Johns Hopkins University. Born in Nova Scotia, at the age of 19 Newcomb left an apprenticeship to join his father in Massachusetts, where the latter was teaching.

Though Newcomb had little conventional schooling, he completed a Bachelor of Science at Harvard in 1858. He later made important contributions to timekeeping, as well as to other fields in applied mathematics, such as economics and statistics. Fluent in several languages, he also wrote and published several popular science books and a science fiction novel.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Simon Newcomb” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (3)