The University of Virginia's second Professor of Mathematics, Charles Bonnycastle, was born in Woolwich, England on 22 November 1796. His father, John, was Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy there, and so Charles grew up and received his education in an environment that very much influenced his own subsequent career. The contributions that the son made to the thirteenth edition of his father's textbook, Introduction to Algebra (1824), in fact, augmented the credentials he presented to Francis Walker Gilmer, agent for the newly forming University of Virginia.

Bonnycastle actually came to the University at its opening in 1825 as the first professor, not of mathematics, but of natural philosophy (as physics was then called). When Thomas Key, the first Professor of Mathematics, resigned to return to his native England, Bonnycastle shifted over to the mathematical chair and remained in that post until his untimely death on 31 October 1840 at the age of only forty-three. "Old Bonny," as he was fondly called by the students, moved away from what was increasingly becoming the antiquated synthetic approach to mathematical pedagogy that had been so typical of Oxbridge mathematical teaching in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and introduced the more avant-garde analytic approach of late eighteenth-century French authors such as Silvestre Lacroix. In 1834, he published his own textbook, Inductive Geometry, in which he aimed to unite the best of the synthetic and the analytic approaches to geometry for the college- and university-level audience. Bonnycastle also contributed works on mathematical and physical topics to the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, one of the few venues available in early nineteenth-century America for the publication of original work in the sciences.

Bonnycastle apparently also entrusted a number of mathematical papers to his friend, Princeton physics professor and (after 1846) first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Joseph Henry. Shortly before his death in 1878, Henry deposited these in the library at the University of Virginia. They did not survive the infamous Rotunda fire of 1895.

The photograph here is after the portrait of Bonnycastle painted by James W. Ford. Bonnycastle is buried in the University Cemetery at the corner of McCormick and Alderman Roads.

Selected References

1. Philip A. Bruce, History of the University of Virginia, vol. 1, New York: MacMillan Company, 1920.
2. Harry Clemons, Notes on the Professors for Whom the University of Virginia Halls and Residence Houses Are Named, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961.
3. Florian Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States, Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1890.
4. Special Collections Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.