Shot and Left for Dead

Shot and Left for Dead: Robert Adrain, The Irish Revolutionary Who Invented Modern StatisticsRobert Adrain arrived in America in 1798 as a wounded fugitive, shot by one of his own men at the Battle of Antrim, hunted by a former employer, fleeing a failed rebellion with his wife and infant daughter. He arrived with nothing but a self-taught mathematical mind of extraordinary power. What he built from that beginning is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of American science.Working in provincial academies and colleges far from the centres of European learning, Adrain independently derived the normal distribution as the law of observational errors, one year before Gauss published the same result in Göttingen. He produced the most accurate estimate of the Earth’s ellipticity of his time, surpassing the great Laplace himself. He founded mathematical journals, annotated standard textbooks with the methods of the French analytical tradition, and built, piece by patient piece, the intellectual infrastructure of American mathematical science.Yet Adrain was also a man of profound contradictions: the republican idealist who enslaved people, the genius who could not manage a rowdy classroom, the pioneer whose most important work went unrecognised for nearly a century.Shot and Left for Dead is the full story of a complete human being, and a forgotten founding figure of modern statistics.