Newcomb

Newcomb, SIMON, astronomer, was born at Wallace, Nova Scotia, 12th March 1835, graduated in 1858 at the Lawrence Scientific School, at Harvard, and in 1861 became a professor of Mathematics in the United States navy. He was appointed at once to the naval observatory at Washington, and in 1877 was placed at the head of the office of the official American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. He organised the government expedition to observe the transit of Venus in 1874, and in 1882 observed the transit of the same planet at the Cape of Good Hope; he had already been sent to Saskatchewan (1860) and to Gibraltar (1870-71) to observe eclipses of the sun. In 1884 he undertook, in addition, the duties of the chair of Mathematics and Astronomy in the Johns Hopkins University. His writings embrace over a hundred papers and memoirs, and include especially most exact tables of the motions of the planets. He has also published several volumes on political economy. Professor Newcomb is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and has received doctorates from Columbian University (at Washington), Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Leyden, and Heidelberg, and many other honours, both in America and in Europe.