Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Noel's Work
Noel Swerdlow is an historian of science whose technical analyses of the works of Ptolemy and Copernicus have led to a greater understanding of the development of astronomy.
His research on the technical aspects of early astronomy has been useful in integrating a highly specialized field into broader scientific, historical, and cultural studies. He has translated and commented on Copernicus’s early astronomical work, The Commentariolus (1973), and is the co-author with the late O. Neugebauer of Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1984). Swerdlow is also the author of The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (1998), a study of Babylonian mathematical planetary theory and its relation to celestial divination and observation. He is working on a general study of astronomy during the Renaissance that will focus on the work of Kepler, Regiomontanus, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo.
Biography
Swerdlow is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1973, 1985) in Princeton, New Jersey.
Swerdlow received a B.A. (1964) from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1968) from Yale University.
Last updated January 1, 2005.
Published on August 1, 1988
