James Pierpont (mathematician)

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James P. Pierpont (June 16, 1866 – December 9, 1938) was an American mathematician born in Connecticut. His father, Cornelius Pierpont, was a wealthy New Haven businessman. He began studying at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, initially in mechanical engineering, but switched to mathematics. After graduating in 1886, he went to Europe to study in Berlin and Vienna. He earned his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1894, under Leopold Gegenbauer and Gustav Ritter von Escherich. His thesis, Zur Geschichte der Gleichung fünften Grades bis zum Jahre 1858, dealt with the history of the quintic equation.

Pierpont returned to New Haven and joined Yale University as a lecturer, becoming a professor in 1898, and spent most of his career there. Early in his career he worked on the Galois theory of equations. In 1895 he introduced what are now known as Pierpont primes: primes of the form 2^a 3^b + 1, which came up in a problem about constructing regular polygons with conic sections.

Around 1900 he moved into real and complex analysis. In his real-analysis textbooks he proposed a definition of the integral similar to Lebesgue integration, which was later criticized by Maurice Fréchet. In the 1920s he turned his interest to non-Euclidean geometry. He died on December 9, 1938, in San Mateo, California, at age 72.