Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was born on May 5, 1809, in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

He was a deaf American scientist and educator. In 1828, he graduated from Yale University where he became a tutor. As he began to lose his hearing due to a hereditary condition, he became a teacher in the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb at Hartford, Connecticut (1831–1832), and a teacher in the New York Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb (1832–1838). From 1838 to 1854, he was a professor of mathematics, natural philosophy, and chemistry at the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi, becoming its chancellor in 1856. After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, when he sympathized with the North, he resigned and went to Washington. In 1864, he became the tenth president of Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York City, a position he held until the year before his death. He was also president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1866; a member of the board of experts of the American Bureau of Mines in 1865, and a member of the American Institute in 1872. Barnard strove to have educational privileges extended by the university to women as well as to men, and Barnard College, for women, established immediately after his death, was named in his honour. Barnard Observatory, one of the few buildings at the University of Mississippi to survive the Civil War, is also named in his honour. He died on April 27, 1889, in New York, New York.