TY  - BOOK
AU  - Thornton,Tamara Plakins
TI  - Nathaniel Bowditch and the power of numbers: how a nineteenth-century man of business, science, and the sea changed American life 
SN  - 9781469628110
AV  - QB36 .N384 2016
PY  - 2016///
CY  - Chapel Hill
PB  - The University of North Carolina Press
KW  - Astronomers
KW  - United States
KW  - Biography
KW  - Mathematicians
KW  - Industrial organization
KW  - History
KW  - Electronic Books
N1  - 2; 2; b
N2  - "Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a mathematician, astronomer, and insurance executive--and a major agent of Enlightenment-era change ... took his personal work habits and blended them with the certainty and predictability of the science that he studied, creating something completely new for his time: the impersonal bureaucracy. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe, Bowditch shaped some of New England's most powerful institutions, from financial corporations to Harvard College, into clockwork mechanisms. He ran his insurance company with rule-bound regularity, implementing systematic and novel paperwork procedures, methodical bookkeeping practices, and standardized filing systems, helping to usher in a new era of intellectual history"--
UR  - https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1074877&site=eds-live&custid=s3260518
ER  -