Allan Marquand

Who was Allan Marquand?

Allan Marquand was an art historian at Princeton University and a curator of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Marquand was the son of Henry Gurdon Marquand, a prominent philanthropist and art collector. After graduating from Princeton in 1874, Allan obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1880, at the Johns Hopkins University. His thesis, supervised by Charles Sanders Peirce, was on the logic of Philodemus. In June 1896, he married Eleanor Cross Marquand daughter of Richard J. Cross and Matilda Redmond Cross. He returned to Princeton in 1881 to teach Latin and logic.

During the 1881–82 academic year, Marquand built a mechanical logical machine that is still extant; he was inspired by related efforts of William S. Jevons in the UK. In 1887, following a suggestion of Peirce's, he outlined a machine to do logic using electric circuits. This necessitated his development of Marquand diagrams.

According to Lavin, the President of Princeton, McCosh, deemed "unorthodox and unCalvinistic" Marquand's relatively mathematical approach to the teaching logic, an approach he had learned at Peirce's feet.