Noel Swerdlow
Noel Mark Swerdlow was a professor emeritus of history, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Career
Swerdlow specialized in the history of exact sciences, astronomy in particular, from antiquity through the 17th century. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1968; his doctoral dissertation, Ptolemy's Theory of the Distances and Sizes of the Planets: A Study of The Scientific Foundations of Medieval Cosmology, was supervised by Asger Aaboe.Publications
The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus's Planetary Theory: A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary by Noel M. Swerdlow in , Symposium on Copernicus, pp. 423–512In 1984, Swerdlow, with co-author Otto E. Neugebauer, published Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, Springer. a two volume investigation of the sources and methods of that pivotal work in the development of astronomy that first laid out a heliocentric theory of the Solar System.
| Princeton University Press | 1998 |
by N. M. Swerdlow published by the National Academies Press for the National Academy of Sciences | 1998
An essay on Thomas Kuhn's First Scientific Revolution, "The Copernican Revolution" in the
In 1988 Swerdlow received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant." In the same year he published the book The Babylonian Theory of the Planets.
In 1988 he was also elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, dating to 1743.