Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) was an astronomer and mathematician. Born in the town of Wallace, Nova Scotia, Newcomb appears to have enjoyed no formal education beyond his short apprenticeship to a charlatan herbalist in 1851. Son of Emily Prince and itinerant school teacher John Burton Newcomb, Newcomb studied mathematics and physics privately and supported himself with some school-teaching before becoming a computer (a functionary in charge of calculations) at the Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1857. At around the same time, he enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, graduating in 1858. In the prelude to the American Civil War, many US Navy staff of Confederate sympathies left the service and, in 1861, Newcomb took advantage of one of the ensuing vacancies to become professor of mathematics and astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, Washington D. C. Newcomb set to work on the measurement of the position of the planets as an...

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