Background
Archibald Henderson was born on July 17, 1877, in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was the son of John Steele and Elizabeth (Brownrigg Cain) Henderson.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States
Henderson studied at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he received Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, in 1899 and Ph.D. in mathematics, in 1902.
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Henderson received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in 1915.
biographer educator historian author
Archibald Henderson was born on July 17, 1877, in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was the son of John Steele and Elizabeth (Brownrigg Cain) Henderson.
Henderson was taught early on to respect the life of the scholar. He began his educational career at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as a mathematics major, and his graduate degrees were in that field as well. Possessed of strong intellectual appetite, he did not view the attainment of the Ph.D. as the end to his education, and while on faculty at his alma mater, he spent the summer of 1903 at the University of Chicago to continue his studies.
For fifty years Henderson was a member of the Department of Mathematics at Chapel Hill - he received a doctorate in 1902, became a full professor in 1908, succeeded his uncle, Dr. William Cain, as department head in 1920, and was appointed Kenan Professor in 1925, serving until his retirement in 1948. Under his direction, the mathematics department expanded enormously, increasing the graduate program, adding (to a curriculum largely designed for engineers) extensive opportunities in pure mathematics, and acquiring a departmental library that is among the best in the South.
Henderson was a prolific writer on scientific topics. His Twenty-seven Lines Upon the Cubic Surface (1911), completed during a year of study at Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and the University of Berlin, was the first American book included in the prestigious series of Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. It was also the first volume on the subject and for over thirty years the only one.
About 1920 he became interested in Einstein's theory of relativity and within two years was writing articles about it. The year 1923-24, he spent on sabbatical, studying at Cambridge and the University of Berlin where he came to know Einstein personally. Henderson collaborated with J. W. Lasley, Jr., and A. W. Hobbs on a textbook, The Theory of Relativity, published in 1924.
The breadth and depth of his learning were made available not only to the scientific community but also to students, who found him a skillful and challenging teacher. Because he had the true teacher's wish to make pure science intelligible to the layman, Henderson wrote more than 750 brief articles on scientific subjects which were syndicated in Hearst newspapers.
Henderson's interest in theater neither started nor ended with Shaw. He had published articles on Maurice Maeterlinck before he discovered Shaw, and to those he added, over the years, evaluations of Ibsen, Hauptmann, Rostand, Wilde, Strindberg, and many others of many lands. Most noted were two books, European Dramatists (1913) and The Changing Drama (1914), both recognizing the international theatrical revolt that followed the work of Ibsen.
From its beginning in 1918, the drama department at Chapel Hill found Henderson an ally and a collaborator. In several articles, he demonstrated an optimism about the future of American drama before most people had noticed its past. He wrote about early drama and entertainment in North Carolina, collected American plays, composed a foreword for Frederick Koch's anthology of Carolina Folk Comedies, and edited and contributed to the Carolina Play-Book.
On the ship that carried Henderson to England for his first meeting with Shaw, a fellow passenger was Mark Twain. The two men formed a friendship, out of which were born several articles by Henderson and a complete biography, Mark Twain (1911). Again, a general interest in fiction had preceded the meeting with a great writer, for Henderson had already written about George Meredith. He was also drawn to regional writers, like Frances Christine Fisher Tierman ("Christian Reid") of Salisbury.
(A Scientific, But Imaginary Symposium In The Neo-Socratic...)
1929Although a Jeffersonian Democrat, Henderson wrote little of a political nature. But he did advocate in print, at least as early as 1910, extending the franchise to women.
The pure science of Henderson's first love was, of course, without boundary; in the "thought movements" of the second, he was consistently both internationalist and regionalist.
Quotations: "Mathematics and the allied sciences of physics and astronomy have absorbed my fullest interest through some fifty years of my life. Concurrently with these scientific studies ran another deep and abiding impulse: the passion for a grasp and mastery of some of the leading thought movements of the time, especially in literature, drama, history and philosophy."
Archibald Henderson was a man of astonishingly varied virtuosity and undeniable genius. Genial and sociable, he was a frequent and sought-after public speaker and, during much of his life, an enthusiastic sportsman, participating in tennis, baseball, and hiking.
Archibald Henderson married Minna “Barbara” Curtis Bynum, in 1903. They had five children: Mary Curtis, Elizabeth Brownrigg, Barbara Gray, Archibald, John Steele.