[Hubert Anson]. American astronomer, born in Sherburne, NY, on the 19th of March 1830. He graduated at Yale in 1850; took a special course in mathematics; was appointed tutor in 1852; and next year was placed in charge of the mathematical department. In 1885 he was elected full professor. He spent a year abroad, and then settled down to his life-work at Yale. In pure mathematics he made researches on the construction of certain curves by points and on certain transcendental curves. His best-known work was in connection with meteors. By his labors, astronomers were able to connect the stream of meteors with the comet of 1866 as soon as the orbit of that comet was computed. His memoir of 1864, on sporadic meteors, determined their numbers, their frequency in the space traversed by the earth, and showed that most of them moved in long orbits, like the comets. He materially aided in the introduction, into educational books, of the continental metric system of weights and measures. He was one of the original members of the National Academy of Science appointed by Congress. He received the degree of LL.D. from the Michigan University in 1868; was elected an associate fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain in 1872, and a fellow of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1886. After being for twenty-five years a member of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, he was elected its vice-president in 1875, and its president in 1885. He was secretary and director-in-chief of the Yale observatory and associate editor of the American Journal of Science. He was the oldest professor in active service at Yale at the time of his death, which occurred in New Haven, CT, on the 12th of August 1896.
