Owen Gingerich

Owen Gingerich is Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Professor Gingerich's research interests have ranged from the recomputation of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation of stellar spectra. He is a leading authority on the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus, the 16th-century cosmologist who proposed the heliocentric system. In recognition of these studies he was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981, subsequently an asteroid was named in his honor, and most recently he has received the Prix Janssen of the French Astronomical Society. An account of his Copernican adventures, The Book Nobody Read, has now also been issued in eight foreign editions.

Professor Gingerich has been vice president of the American Philosophical Society (America's oldest scientific academy) and he has served as chairman of the US National Committee of the International Astronomical Union. A world traveler, he has successfully observed thirteen total solar eclipses. In 1999 he delivered an Advent sermon at the National Cathedral, and Harvard University Press has published God's Universe, lectures given at Harvard's Memorial Church.

Besides nearly 600 technical or educational articles and reviews, Professor Gingerich has written more popularly on astronomy in several encyclopedias and journals. In 1984 he won the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching.