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Adrain took part in the Irish rebellion of 1798 and escaped with his wife to the USA. He was professor of mathematics at Queen's University (now Rutgers) New Brunswick from 1809 to 1813 then at Columbia University from 1813 to 1826.
Adrain published on the normal law of errors in 1808, one year before Gauss. He studied the catenary and other curves. He gave 1/319 as the elipticity of the Earth, a figure better than Laplace who gave 1/336.
References (5 books/articles)
Other Web sites:
You can see a history of the Department Adrain was in at Rutgers, USA