Henry Heaton
Henry C Heaton | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | April 19, 1846 |
| Died | January 27, 1927 (aged 80) Biddle, Montana, USA |
| Known for | Problem solver |
| Spouse | Mary Ann Marker |
| Parent(s) | Weaver Heaton and Rebecca Naylor Sharp |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
Henry Heaton (or Henry C Heaton) (1846–1927) was a North-American amateur mathematician.
Life and work
Heaton was a son of a millwright. In 1852 the family moved to Greenfields, Pennsylvania, where Heaton attended the school four months every winter until he was fourteen years old. At the age of eighteen he began his two careers, as a carpenter and as a teacher. He studied also for his BS in the Mount Union College in Ohio in the course 1866-1867. In 1869 he moved to Taylor, Iowa. After, he moved to Des Moines, Iowa where he met Joel E. Hendricks, the founder and editor of The Analyst (now Annals of Mathematics) who encouraged him to publish mathematical problems and solutions in the journal.[1] In 1877 he and his family were living in Sabula, Iowa; in 1879 in Atlantic, Iowa; in 1881 in Lewis, Iowa; in 1906 in Belfield, North Dakota; and, finally, he died in Biddle, Montana in 1927
From 1874 to 1918, Heaton published about one hundred solutions to mathematical problems in The Analyst and in The American Mathematical Monthly.[2] His most important and remembered contribution was the publication for the first time in 1896[3] of the familiar form of the solution of the quadratic equation.[4] At the end of the brief article, he himself wondered if that was really new.
References
- ^ O'Connor & Robertson, MacTutor History of Mathematics.
- ^ See list in Mactutor History of Mathematics.
- ^ Heaton 1896, p. 236-237.
- ^ Krantz & Parks 2014, p. 320.
Bibliography
- Heaton, Henry (1896). "A Method of Solving Quadratic Equations". The American Mathematical Monthly. 3 (10): 236–237. ISSN 0002-9890. JSTOR 2971099.
{{cite journal}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Krantz, Steven G.; Parks, Harold R. (2014). A Mathematical Odyssey. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4614-8938-2.
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External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Henry Heaton", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews