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I. Bernard Cohen

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I. Bernard Cohen
Born1 March 1914
Far Rockaway, New York City, New York, US
Died20 June 2003(2003-06-20) (aged 89)
Waltham, Massachusetts, US
OccupationHistorian of science
TitleVictor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science
Academic background
EducationHarvard University (AB 1937, PhD 1947)
ThesisBenjamin Franklin’s Experiments
Doctoral advisorGeorge Sarton
Academic work
DisciplineHistory of science
InstitutionsHarvard University (1942–2002)
Notable students

I. Bernard Cohen[1] (1 March 1914 – 20 June 2003) was an American historian of science. He taught at Harvard University for 60 years, 1942–2002, mentoring notable students including George Basalla, Lorraine Daston, and Allen G. Debus. He was the author of many books on the history of science and, in particular, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Howard H. Aiken. He made a full English translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica and was the second chief editor of the history of science journal Isis.

Early life and education

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I. Bernard Cohen was born 1 March 1914 in Far Rockaway, New York City, New York, US to parents Isadore and Blanche Cohen; he had one older sister, Harriet.[2][3] His father died just before Cohen's bar mitzvah at age 12, and became unmotivated and spent the next years performing unremarkably in schools and early jobs; he attended Columbia Grammar School through 1929 and then spent one semester at New York University before transferring to Farmingdale Agricultural Institute on Long Island for veterinary medicine.[3][4] This also did not work out; he returned to New York University but then dropped out and became a Prohibition rum runner while living with relatives in Connecticut.[4] After nearly being shot while unloading rum, he enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy and began to take his studies more seriously; there, he graduated top of his class in 1933.[4]

Cohen next attended Harvard University, where he intended to become a theoretical or mathematical chemical physicist and became a protege of George D. Birkhoff.[4] He graduated in 1937 with a BSc in mathematics and honors in history, with an undergraduate thesis "The Billiard Ball Problem and the Recurrence Property of Dynamical Systems" advised by Birkhoff.[5] He moved directly into Harvard's new PhD program in the history of science, the first in the US,[5] and became the first American to receive a PhD in the history of science in 1947.[3][6]

In this time, Cohen worked closely with historian of science George Sarton, founder of the History of Science Society and founder of the journal Isis,[7] becoming his personal assistant 1938–1941.[8] In 1941, petitioning Harvard president James B. Conant to support Cohen in a teaching position,[5] Sarton wrote Cohen was "the best disciple I have had thus far out of a selected group of about a thousand men. He is also the only one whom I could train completely, and his preparation for work in my field is as good as could be from every point of view, scientific, philosophic, historical, and linguistic."[9] Teaching duties beginning 1942 and secret work for the US in World War II 1942–1943 took his attention off his dissertation research for years, and in the end his final thesis in 1947 was his already-published 1941 edited volume Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Edited, with a Critical and Historical Introduction.[3][6]

Career

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Cohen taught at Harvard from 1942 through his retirement emeritus in 1984, then at the Harvard Extension School and many visiting positions, until his hospitalization for terminal illness in 2002.[10] He started as a teaching fellow and next an instructor in physics, while still a graduate student,[11] and he eventually rose to the position of Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science at Harvard in 1977.[12] During his tenure, he developed Harvard's general education program and program in the history of science.[3] He succeeded George Sarton as editor of Isis[13] (1952–1958) and, later, served as president of the History of Science Society (1961–1962).[14][15] Cohen was also a president of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science 1968–1971.[16][17]

Cohen was an internationally recognized Isaac Newton scholar. He co-authored a 1972 variorum edition of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica begun by Alexandre Koyré,[18] and a 1999 English translation of the full Principia, begun in collaboration with the Latinist Anne Whitman.[2] Many, including Cohen,[12] considered this 974-page translation to be his most important work. The project was initially prepared in collaboration with Whitman until her death in 1984, and it took Cohen over 15 years to fully translate.[19]

His interests ranged from science and public policy to the history of computers, with several decades as a special consultant for history of computing with IBM.[20] Among his hundreds of publications were the books Franklin and Newton (1956), The Birth of a New Physics (1959), The Newtonian Revolution (1980), Revolution in Science (1985), Science and the Founding Fathers (1995), Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (1999), and his last book, The Triumph of Numbers (2005).[2]

Cohen wrote thirteen essays published in Scientific American between 1948 and 1992.[18] Cohen's April 1955 interview with Albert Einstein for Scientific American was the last Einstein gave before his death in that same month,[21] and it was published that July. In March 1984, Scientific American published an essay by Cohen on Florence Nightingale and her contributions to social statistics.

In 1973 he gave three lectures for the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography.[22] In 1974, he was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society.[16][23] He was awarded the 1986 Pfizer Award for his book Revolutions in Science.[24] He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1952[25] and of the American Philosophical Society in 1995.[26]

Cohen supervised the doctoral dissertations of Lorraine Daston, Allen G. Debus,[27] Judith Grabiner, Kenneth Manning, Uta Merzbach, Duane H. D. Roller, and Joan L. Richards.[28] Among Cohen's other students and protégés were the Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hosein Nasr;[29] Tufts University professor George E. Smith; Bucknell University professor Martha Verbrugge; and Jeremy Bernstein.

Personal life

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Cohen married Frances Parsons Davis in 1944 and they remained married until her death in 1982.[30] They had a daughter, Frances Bernard Cohen, who became a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.[31] He remarried in 1984 with the social worker Susan T. Johnson, gaining two stepsons.[32] He died of the bone marrow disorder myelodysplasia in 2003.[12][33][34]

Selected publications

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General

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  • 1948 – Science, Servant of Man: A Layman's Primer for the Age of Science (Little, Brown, LCCN 49-27692)
  • 1955 – Cohen, I. Bernard (July 1955). "An Interview with Einstein". Scientific American. 193 (1): 68–73. JSTOR 24944702.
  • 1984 – Cohen, I. Bernard (March 1984). "Florence Nightingale". Scientific American. 250 (3): 128–37. Bibcode:1984SciAm.250c.128C. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0384-128. JSTOR 24969329. PMID 6367033. (alternative pagination depending on country of sale: 98–107)
  • 1985 – Revolution in Science (Belknap Press, ISBN 0-674-76777-2)
  • 1985 – Album of Science: From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (Scribner, ISBN 0-684-15377-7)
  • 1994 – Interactions: Some Contacts between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences (MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-03223-6)
  • 2005 – The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-05769-0)

Isaac Newton

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  • 1960 – The Birth of a New Physics (Science Study Series S10, Anchor Books, Doubleday, LCCN 84-25582; W. W. Norton 1985 revised ed., ISBN 0-393-01994-2)
  • 1971 – Introduction to Newton's Principia (Harvard University Press 1st ed., LCCN 78-28770; iUniverse 1999 ed., ISBN 1-58348-601-1)
  • 1972 – edited, with Alexandre Koyré and Anne Whitman, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Vol. I & II, Third Edition (1726) with Variant Readings (Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0674664753)
  • 1980 – The Newtonian Revolution: With Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-22964-2)
  • 1996 – edited, with Richard S. Westfall, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries (Norton Critical Editions, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-95902-3)
  • 1999 – translated, with Anne Whitman, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-08816-6)
  • 2000 – edited, with Jed Z. Buchwald, Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy (MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-02477-2)
  • 2002 – edited, with George E. Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-65177-8)

Early American science

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  • 1941 – edited, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Edited, with a Critical and Historical Introduction (Harvard University Press)
  • 1953 – Benjamin Franklin: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Makers of the American Tradition series, Bobbs-Merrill, LCCN 53-9874)
  • 1956 – Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (American Philosophical Society, LCCN 56-13224)
  • 1976 – Cohen, I. Bernard (1976). "Science and the Growth of the American Republic". The Review of Politics. 38 (3): 359–398. JSTOR 1406619.
  • 1990 – Benjamin Franklin's Science (Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-06658-8)
  • 1995 – Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison (W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-03501-8)

Computing

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  • 1990 – Cohen, I. Bernard (1990). "Reviewed Works: A History of Computing Technology by Michael R. Williams; Préhistoire et histoire des ordinateurs: Origines du calcul aux premiers calculateurs électroniques by Robert Ligonnière; Histoire de l'informatique by Philippe Breton". Technology and Culture. 31 (4): 907–911. doi:10.2307/3105941. JSTOR 3105941.
  • 1999 – Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (History of Computing, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-03262-7)
  • 1999 – edited, with Gregory W. Welch, Makin' Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer (MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-03263-5)

References

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  1. ^ "'my correct and full legal name is (and always has been) and is listed as, I. Bernard Cohen, which is the name recorded on my birth certificate, my passport, my FBI clearance, every copyright for some thirty or more books, and other official records': I. Bernard Cohen, letter dated 9 Mar. 1992", from Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 5
  2. ^ a b c Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 4
  3. ^ a b c d e Gingerich (2005), p. 396
  4. ^ a b c d Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 5
  5. ^ a b c Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 6
  6. ^ a b Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 11
  7. ^ Holton (2009), pp. 79–80, 82
  8. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 4–7, 11–16
  9. ^ Harvey (2009), p. S277
  10. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 6, 27, 34
  11. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 8
  12. ^ a b c Poitier (2003)
  13. ^ Holton (2009), p. 84
  14. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 18
  15. ^ "Past Presidents". History of Science Society. Retrieved 9 November 2024.
  16. ^ a b Hiebert (1975), pp. 478–481
  17. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 4, 24
  18. ^ a b Gingerich (2005), p. 397
  19. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 21–23, 30–31
  20. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 4, 25–27
  21. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 32
  22. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 24
  23. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 15–16
  24. ^ "Pfizer Award". History of Science Society. Retrieved 21 December 2024.
  25. ^ "I. Bernard Cohen". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  26. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  27. ^ Hankins (1999), pp. 789
  28. ^ I. Bernard Cohen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  29. ^ Dastagir (2018), p. 619
  30. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 10–11, 28
  31. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 11
  32. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), pp. 28, 34
  33. ^ Dauben, Gleason & Smith (2009), p. 34
  34. ^ Saxon (2003)

Bibliography

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