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Visionary Calculations: Inventing the Mathematical Economy in Nineteenth-Century America

In June 1805, Nathaniel Bowditch wrote to a friend that “any writing except mercantile business or mathematical subjects is a task to me.”1 At the time, Bowditch had recently joined the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company in Salem, Massachusetts. He had no previous insurance experience, but he had authored The American Practical Navigator, a book of updated calculations used by American sailors.2 Bowditch would eventually become nationally recognized as the father of American mathematics, but his real pride was in combining his twin passions for business and mathematics to create a busy and comfortable life for himself and his family. In the intervening centuries, most Americans have become accustomed to a mathematical economy. Linking this world and Nathaniel Bowditch’s has been the goal across a wide variety of scholarship. Historians, sociologists, science studies scholars, and even economists have sought the processes by which the economy came into being during the crucial decades of the 1930s and 1940s.3 My dissertation aims to disrupt this conversation by turning attention to the longer history of mathematical commerce. Rather than ask what mathematics did to modern economics, it asks why anyone, at the outset of the twentieth century, would have considered mathematics useful for understanding economic life at all.