Benjamin Osgood Pierce was born on February 11, 1854 in Beverly, Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the only son of Benjamin Osgood and Mehitable Osgood (Seccomb) Peirce and a descendant of John Pers, a weaver of Norwich, Norfolk County, England, who emigrated to New England in 1637. For a time his father was professor of chemistry and natural philosophy in Mercer University at Macon, Georgia.
After an excellent preliminary training including Latin, Greek, and mathematics, young
Benjamin Osgood Peirce entered Harvard and graduated in the class of 1876 with highest honors in physics. During the years 1877 - 1880 he was a Parker Fellow in Germany, and in 1879, after two years in Wiedemann's laboratory in Leipzig, he obtained the Ph. D. degree. Harvard conferred on him the degree of D. S. in 1912.
During 1883 Benjamin Osgood Peirce was at Berlin with Helmholtz, from whom he drew much inspiration. Returning to America he taught for a year at the Boston Latin School and was then made an instructor in mathematics at Harvard. In 1884 he was appointed an assistant professor of mathematics and physics, and in 1888 he became Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. The course on the Newtonian potential function and Fourier series which he and Professor W. E. Byerly developed marked a new era in mathematical physics in American universities. The first edition of his Elements of the Theory of the Newtonian Potential Function was published in 1886, but the third edition, appearing in 1902, was more than trebled in size. His thirty-two-page Short Table of Integrals was issued as a pamphlet in 1889 and also bound in with the 1889 edition of Byerly's Elements of the Integral Calculus but after prodigious labor this was expanded to a book of 144 pages (1910).
Again enlarged, it became the most valuable work of its kind for ordinary use. Besides graduate courses in pure mathematics and mathematical physics, particularly the theory of electricity and magnetism and hydrodynamics, Peirce developed laboratory courses in electricity and magnetism, and threw himself vigorously into the prosecution of research which he kept up with unabated assiduity to the end of his life. The list of his fifty-six papers published during the years 1875 - 1915 is appended to the Mathematical and Physical Papers, 1903 -1913, by Benjamin Osgood Peirce. Apart from those on various parts of mathematical physics the experimental papers nearly all called for an unusual amount of mathematical theory. Perhaps the most notable are the researches on the thermal conductivity of stone and its variation of temperature, and his researches on magnetism, subjects of extreme difficulty.
Benjamin Osgood Peirce was an editor of the Physical Review. Among the 150 leading physicists of the country in 1903 he was rated by his colleagues as nineteenth. His affiliations with scientific groups were numerous. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1884, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900, of the National Academy of Sciences in 1906, and of the American Philosophical Society in 1910. Benjamin Osgood Peirce was one of the founders of the American Physical Society and its president just before he died on January 14, 1914.
Benjamin Osgood Peirce was a member of the American Mathematical Society, of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America, and of the Société Francaise de Physique.
The fundamentals of Benjamin Osgood Peirce's character were Absolute self-effacement and devotion to duty. His charm of personality and brilliant intellect drew to him a host of friends among students and colleagues.
Quotes from others about the person
President Eliot cited Benjamin Osgood Peirce as a "man of science ignorant only of his own deserts. "
Benjamin Osgood Peirce was married in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 27, 1882, to Isabella Turnbull Landreth, daughter of the Rev. P. Landreth of Montrose and Brechin, by whom he had two daughters.
