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will pay close attention to details when it serves the purpose of solving larger problems that provoke
their interest. But this does not mean that INTJs will be similarly inspired by details when it comes
to a task like inspecting airplanes, getting every last barnacle off the hull, or monitoring the readings
of instruments as a form of daily maintenance. What matters here is not so much the detail-oriented
nature of the activity as the reason for which it is being performed. It is probably fair to say that
INTJs are detail-oriented intuitives...but they only enjoy it in some situations.
Bowditch exhibited pronounced mathematical skills from his earliest childhood. INTJ/Ps are
probably the types most likely to be math-gifted—not that all of them will like math or get good
grades, but the probability is there nonetheless. (On a curious side note, two of Bowditch's
brothers, Samuel and William, also displayed his same remarkable mathematical abilities—
evidently a genetic heritage. Given that Samuel "pursued his studies with waywardness and
eccentricity," he was most likely an NTP. I'm not certain what type William was.) Bowditch also
loved learning, another NT trait. In fact, it was said of his mother that she "was sometimes obliged
even to restrain and check his fondness for study, as being excessive."
All that studying paid off; when he was still serving his apprenticeship at the ship chandlery,
Bowditch corrected an error in Isaac Newton's Principia. The mistake had gone unnoticed for a
century. (This is particularly impressive in light of the fact that Bowditch had to learn Latin just so
that he could read Newton's work.) Doubtlessly the publishers of Principia were surprised to
receive a letter from an unknown youth in America.
Whether through constant practice or natural gifting, Bowditch had an exceptional knack for doing
math in his head, as the following story reveals:
Captain Prince relates, that one day, when dining at the table of the American consul at Madeira, "his
supercargo [Bowditch] laid down his knife and fork, and, after squeezing the tips of his fingers for two
minutes," gave to the lady of the house an answer to an intricate question which she had proposed; to the
great astonishment of her clerk, who, after a long calculation, had succeeded in solving it, and "who
exclaimed that he did not believe there was another man on the island who could have done it in two
hours."
Many math-gifted INTJs are frustrated by teachers' requirements that they "show their work" on
math problems. If the INTJ can do the math in their head, it feels pointless and tedious to write it
out. Not that most INTJs can do mental math as well as Bowditch, but they do seem to have
enhanced abilities in this area compared to most other types. Math-gifted INTJs may find that a
problem "clicks together" almost without conscious thought.
One might expect that with these phenomenal powers of calculation, Bowditch would hardly bother
to show his work when sharing mathematical ideas with his peers. Actually, the reverse was true.
He became famous in scientific circles for filling in the missing steps left out in a book by Laplace,
a mathematician who was not inclined to show his work whatsoever. As Bowditch noted,
"Whenever I meet in La Place with the words, 'Thus it plainly appears,' I am sure that hours, and
perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears."
The biggest project of Bowditch's life was to create a user-friendly, state of the art English version
of Laplace's French book Mécanique Céleste, a sort of "Celestial Mechanics for Dummies." To
appreciate the significance of this self-set task, it should be noted that the "original work [was
considered] so abstruse and difficult, as to lead a writer in the Edinburgh Review to say there were
not twelve individuals in Great Britain who could read it with any facility."
Essentially Bowditch repeated what he had done for his shipmates, only this time for the sake of
mathematics professors. And here too we see evidence of his extraordinary thoroughness: "the