Excerpt:
Thomas Jefferson, born in 1743 on the Virginian frontier to a wealthy surveyor and land-owner and his English wife, went at the age of 17, in 1760, to William and Mary College in Williamsburg, the second oldest college, after Harvard, in the American colonies. Here his abilities were recognised and nurtured by one of the great influences upon his life, his mathematics teacher the Scots-born William Small. In his autobiography Jefferson wrote a warm tribute to his teacher