Owen Gingerich

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It is thanks in large part to Gingerich's work that De revolutionibus has been better researched and cataloged than any other historical first edition with the exception of the Gutenberg Bible .

Owen Jay Gingerich (* 1930 in Washington (Iowa) ) is, among other things, a former professor of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard University .

As an astronomer, he was known, among other things, for models of the solar atmosphere and was a senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He also wrote popular science essays and books (for example, he edited several Scientific American anthologies on astronomy and the history of astronomy in the 1970s and 1980s) and taught The Astronomical Perspective course at Harvard for many years , which was primarily intended for students of other subjects. He received the Radcliffe Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Prize for his lectures.

From 1992 to 1993 he was chairman of the history of science department at Harvard. In 2000 he was retired.

Gingerich is considered an authority on Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus . For three decades he examined the more than 580 copies of Nicolaus Copernicus ' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium that existed around the world and reported on it in The Book That Nobody Read , published in 2004. This was preceded by a thesis that Copernicus' work of 1543 had originally received little attention. Gingerich found a copy with many comments by Erasmus Reinhold and examined other known copies on it in order to trace the spread of the theory. For these investigations he received a high Polish Order of Merit in 1981.

Gingerich edited translations of Theodor von Oppolzer's Canon of Eclipses and Max Caspar's Kepler biography.

Gingerich is himself a collector of rare books and of clam and snail shells and is also a passionate observer of solar eclipses on his worldwide travels .

In 1985 the asteroid (2658) Gingerich was named after him. He was Vice President of the American Philosophical Society and Chairman of the US Committee of the International Astronomical Union. He also organized the history department of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), whose Doggett Prize he received in 2004. He also received the AAS Didaktik-Preis (Education Prize) in 2004 and the Jules Janssen Prize in 2006 . He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1975 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences one year later .

Fonts

  • An annotated census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) . Leiden: Brill, 2002 ISBN 90-04-11466-1 (Studia copernicana. Brill's series; v. 2, 434 pages)
  • The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus . New York, Walker 2004, ISBN 0-8027-1415-3 , as a paperback from Penguin
  • God's Universe: Thinking About Open Questions . Berlin University Press, 2008, ISBN 3-940432-18-0 (English: God´s Universe , Harvard University Press 2006, William Belden Noble Lectures in Harvard 2005)
  • The Great Copernicus Chase and other adventures in astronomical history , Cambridge University Press 1992 (collection of articles)
  • The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler , American Institute of Physics 1993 (collection of articles)
  • The Galileo Affair , Scientific American, August 1982
  • Physical Sciences in the 20th Century , Scribner 1989
  • With Barbara Welther: Planetary, Lunar and solar positions, new and full moons, 1650-1805 , American Philosophical Society 1983
  • With Kenneth R. Lang (editor): Source Book in astronomy and astrophysics 1900-1975 , Harvard UP 1979
  • With James MacLachlan: Nicolaus Copernicus - making the earth a planet , Oxford University Press 2005

Web links

credentials

  1. ↑ Peter DeMarco. " Book quest took him around the globe ". Boston Globe . April 13, 2004
  2. ↑ Owen Gingerich ( Memento of the original dated December 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Harvard faculty web page. Accessed Sept. 22, 2006. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fas.harvard.edu
personal data
SURNAME Gingerich, Owen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gingerich, Owen Jay (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American college professor of astronomy and the history of science
DATE OF BIRTH 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington (Iowa)