Dava Sobel

Dava Sobel (born June 15, 1947) is an American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. Her books include Longitude, about English clockmaker John Harrison; Galileo's Daughter, about Galileo's daughter Maria Celeste; and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars about the Harvard Computers.

Biography Sobel was born in The Bronx, New York City. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Binghamton University. She wrote Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time in 1995. The story was made into a television movie of the same name by Charles Sturridge and Granada Film in 1999, and was shown in the United States by A&E.

Her book Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 2005, Sobel published The Planets, her most ambitious topic to date. In this New York Times extended best seller, Sobel explores the origins and oddities of the planets through the lenses of both science and popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history.

She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002.

Sobel made her first foray into teaching at the University of Chicago as the Vare Writer-in-Residence in the winter of 2006. She taught a one-quarter seminar on science writing.

She served as a judge for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012.

Sobel is the niece of journalist Ruth Gruber and the cousin of epidemiologist David Michaels.

Legacy Asteroid 30935 Davasobel, discovered by Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy, was named after her for her literary work in physics.

Publications

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (1995) . – the genius in question was John Harrison, who spent decades trying to convince the British Admiralty of the accuracy of his naval timepieces and their use in determining longitude when at sea in order to win the longitude prize. The book itself won the 1997 British Book of the Year award. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love (2000) The Best American Science Writing 2004 (editor) , The Planets: A discourse on the discovery, science, history and mythology, of the planets in our solar system, with one chapter devoted to each of the celestial spheres. (2005) ,

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars (2016) , The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (2024) ,

Recognition In 2008, Sobel was awarded the Klumpke-Roberts Award by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022 "for outstanding writings covering many centuries of key developments in physics and astronomy and the people central to those developments".