Wallace C. (Wallace Clarke) Boyden

Wallace Clarke Boyden was an American educator and author born on November 22, 1858, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Records available through Project Gutenberg and family-history sources identify him as the author of A First Book in Algebra and give his lifespan as 1858–1937.

Biographical details in family and genealogical records say he studied in the Bridgewater public schools, at Bridgewater State Normal School, and at Amherst College, graduating in 1883. Those same sources describe a career in education that included serving as principal of Stoughton High School, teaching mathematics at Williston Seminary in Easthampton for six years, and later working at the Boston Normal School, where he became head master.

Boyden also appears as a compiler and co-author of Thomas Boyden and His Descendants (1901), a family genealogy that shows another side of his writing: careful, documentary, and historically minded. He died on September 8, 1937.