Owen Gingerich (1930–2023) was Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
In addition to his research and teaching, he wrote many books on the history of astronomy. Gingerich was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Academy of the History of Science. He was active in the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists, and served as a trustee of the Templeton Foundation.
In the 1950s, he researched Charles Messier’s life and the Messier Catalog, finding notes by Messier on two additional objects discovered by Pierre Méchain, which he added to the catalog. Gingerich was a widely recognized authority on both Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus, especially in regard to Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. He undertook a three-decade-long personal survey of that book, examining over 580 sixteenth-century copies in libraries throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. His annotated census was published in 2002, and an account of his Copernican adventures, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, appeared in fourteen foreign editions.
At Harvard, Gingerich taught “The Astronomical Perspective”, a core science course for non-scientists, which at the time of his retirement in 2000 was the longest-running course under the same management at the university. In 1984, he won the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching, due in part to his creative use of medieval costumes, fire extinguishers, and at least one aircraft.
In addition to over 20 books, Gingerich published nearly 600 technical or educational articles and reviews. Two anthologies of his essays were released: The Great Copernicus Chase and Other Adventures in Astronomical History from Cambridge University Press and The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler in the American Institute of Physics Masters of Modern Physics series. He was a councilor of the American Astronomical Society and helped organize its Historical Astronomy Division. In 2000, he won their Doggett Prize for his contributions to the history of astronomy, and in 2006 was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society. Asteroid 2658 Gingerich, discovered on February 13, 1980, at the Harvard College Observatory, was named in his honor. Owen Gingerich died on May 28, 2023, at the age of 93.
