The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Mathematics in Colonial Settings

The story of mathematics in colonial North America may be said to begin in 1636 with the founding by the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Harvard College as a Congregationalist institution. It is not by chance that the first colleges in the British colonies south of what would become the border with Canada were Congregationalist, and this includes Harvard and Yale (as well as Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst). As heirs of “rational and hierarchical Calvinsim in America” [2, p. 248], Congregationalists valued the intellect and placed considerable emphasis on transplanting from England “the apparatus of civilized life and learning” [17, p. 273]. At Harvard, relative to mathematics, that translated into a curriculum in which mathematics was taught beginning in 1638 in emulation of the English universities like Cambridge on which it was modeled.

Although Harvard trained students for the ministry, it was not a seminary (more than half of its students followed secular pursuits upon graduation). The professional study of theology began only upon completion of the bachelor's degree; what the College was meant to educate were “gentlemen” and to “advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity” [17, p. 43]. To that end, it was assumed that students knew Latin, the language both of instruction and of most of the textbooks. Undergraduate training then involved a prescribed course in six of the traditional Seven Arts, which included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy; students also studied philosophy, Hebrew and Greek as well as ancient history.