2007 lecture:
"The Astronomical Worlds of Thomas Harriot"
Dr. Owen Gingerich
Emeritus Professor of Astronomy
& History of Science
History of Science Department
Harvard University
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
7:30 pm
Hendrix Theatre
Mendenhall Student Center
Reception to follow
Transportation to and from the Belk Building, corner of Greenville and Charles boulevards, available 6:30 to 10:30 pm
Owen Gingerich's Scholarly Contributions
In the past three decades Professor Gingerich has become a leading authority on the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus, the 16th- century cosmologist who proposed the heliocentric system. The Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer undertook a three-decade-long personal survey of Copernicus' great book, De revolutionibus , examining over 580 sixteenth-century copies in libraries scattered throughout Europe and North America, as well as those in China, Japan, and Australia. His annotated census of these books was published in 2002 as a 434-page monograph. In recognition of these studies, he was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981, and more recently an asteroid has been named in his honor. An account of his Copernican adventures, The Book Nobody Read, published in 2004 by Walker & Co., has now been issued as a Penguin paperback.
