Career
He served on the faculty of Dickinson College from 1814 to 1816, and later taught and tutored prominent Philadelphians, including the brothers Mathew Carey Lea (later a pioneer photographic chemist) and Henry Charles Lea (publisher, historian and civic activist). Contemporaries described him as “brilliant”,
In 1814, Nulty became a professor of mathematics at Dickinson College, where he remained for two years. In 1816 he moved to Philadelphia at the invitation of The Philadelphia Life Insurance Company and the Pennsylvania Company, who each recruited Nulty as one of the first United States. actuarial scientists.
His new countrymen also called Nulty to assist with mathematics for the United States. Office of Coast Survey.
In 1817, Nulty joined Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the American Philosophical Society. Nulty was also a correspondent of mathematician, chemist and natural philosopher Robert M. Patterson, Doctor of Medicine Nulty contributed to the defunct Mathematical Diary, one of the 3 earliest learned mathematical journals published in the United States. His Elements of Geometry, theoretical and practical Philadelphia: J. Wetham (1836) was one of the first two or three original geometries published in the United States and is still over 150 years later available from multiple publishers in historical reprints.
In 1840, P.J. Walker, director of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, called Nulty "unsurpassed at home or abroad" in pure mathematics.
