Background
Artemas Martin was born on August 3, 1835 on a farm in Steuben County, New York. He was the son of James Madison Martin and Orenda Knight (Bradley) Martin. During his early childhood the family moved to Venango County, Pa.
Artemas Martin was born on August 3, 1835 on a farm in Steuben County, New York. He was the son of James Madison Martin and Orenda Knight (Bradley) Martin. During his early childhood the family moved to Venango County, Pa.
His formal education consisted of three winters in the district school and a few months in the Franklin Academy when he was seventeen.
As a boy he worked at farming and gardening in summer, and at woodchopping during the winter. Later he taught a district school for four winters, but for the most part, until he was fifty, he earned his living at farming, woodchopping, and oil-well drilling. His meager leisure he spent in the study of mathematics. Early in life he had begun to contribute mathematical problems and solutions to various journals, and in 1877, while making a bare living in market gardening on a small rented place in Erie County, Pa. , he began to edit and publish the Mathematical Visitor (1877 - 94). In 1882 he began to publish the Mathematical Magazine (1882 - 1913). For financial reasons he found it necessary to do the typesetting as well as the editing, and he became an expert mathematical typesetter. In 1885 Martin joined the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, first as librarian and later as computer. He died in Washington on November 7, 1918.
Martin's mathematical abilities received wide recognition: Yale conferred upon him the honorary degree of A. M. in 1877; Rutgers honored him with a Ph. D. degree in 1882; and in 1885 Hillsdale awarded him an LL. D. degree. Numerous learned societies in the United States and abroad honored him with membership. His memory is perpetuated in the Artemas Martin Library of the American University. This library, consisting principally of mathematical works, was during Martin's lifetime considered one of the finest private mathematical collections in America. At the same university Martin also endowed an Artemas Martin Lectureship in mathematics and physics.
a member of the London Mathematical Society (1878), the Société Mathématique de Francen (1884), the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (1885), the Philosophical Society of Washington (1886), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1890), the New York Mathematical Society (1891), American Mathematical Society, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, the Mathematical Association of England, the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung
All of his spare time he still devoted to work in pure mathematics, to the editing of his mathematical journals, which did much to foster a love for mathematics on its less academic side, and to the preparation of papers which appeared in various journals at home and abroad. His writings dealt chiefly with the properties of numbers and of triangles, diophantine analysis, average, probability, elliptic integrals, and logarithms. He was an authority on early mathematical textbooks, of which he had a notable collection, and collaborated with J. M. Greenwood in the preparation of American Text-Books on Arithmetic, issued by the United States Bureau of Education in 1899. Personally, Martin was a man of simple tastes but of prepossessing appearance. Although he exhibited some of the limitations imposed by pioneer life, he at the same time exemplified most of its robust virtues. He was fond of home life and of children, but he denied himself marriage that he might care for his parents and sisters.
Artemas Martin was never married.
