He was born in
New York City, and graduated from
Columbia College in 1818, he subsequently studied
medicine at the
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He did not practice medicine for long however, instead devoting himself to scientific and literary pursuits. He was appointed professor of mathematics and astronomy at Columbia College in 1825, when he was twenty-six years old; he retained his chair until 1843. Anderson was elected an Associate Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1831. He married Fanny Da Ponte, the daughter of
Lorenzo Da Ponte, a collaborator of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They had two children named Elbert Ellery and Edward Henry. Elbert Ellery married to Augusta Chauncey, granddaughter of Commodore
Isaac Chauncey, and their son Peter Chauncey Anderson married to Mary Yale Ogden, of the
Yale and
Ogden families. She was the granddaughter of Olivia Yale, daughter of Colonel Braddam Yale, and was related to
Edith Ogden, wife of Chicago Mayor
Carter Harrison IV (himself a cousin of US President
William Henry Harrison) and
Aaron Ogden, the governor of New Jersey. From 1840 to 1844, Anderson remained briefly in Paris where he worked closely with the anti-Newtonian astronomer
François Arago,
Carl Friedrich Gauss, and
Alexander Dallas Bache (
Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson), who later established the "Magnetische Verein" (Magnetic Association). In 1848 as a
geologist, he accompanied the United States
Dead Sea exploration expedition, commanded by Captain
William F. Lynch. His reports from the expedition,
Geological Reconnaissance of Part of the Holy Land, were published by the United States government in 1848 and 1849. Under the aegis of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, Anderson circulated a petition urging the United States to promote Jewish colonization in Palestine, part of the Jewish restoration movement that flowered at the time. He was a trustee of Columbia college from 1851 until his death and was also professor
emeritus from 1866. He visited
Pope Pius IX in
Rome several times, and was eventually made a
Knight Commander of the
order of St. Gregory the Great. He made a
pilgrimage to
Lourdes and Rome in 1875; afterwards, he travelled to Australia in order to observe a
transit of
Venus. He planned to return home by way of India, but, after
mountain-climbing in the
Himalayas, he died of a disease in
Lahore on October 19, at age 76. He is buried in a vault under the
Church of the Madonna in
Fort Lee, New Jersey, a church in whose construction he had been involved. ==References==