Liba Taub

Liba Taub (born 1954) is an American historian of science, who was Curator and Director of the Whipple Museum at the University of Cambridge from 1995 to 2022.

Education Taub completed her doctorate in 1987 at the University of Oklahoma.

Career and research Taub was Curator at the Adler Planetarium. Her research specialises in ancient Greek and Roman astronomy, physics and meteorology and researching the history of scientific instruments. She became a Fellow of Newnham College in 1996 and serves as a Professor of History and the Philosophy of Science. Taub has been an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Excellence Cluster Topoi in Berlin since 2010, in which she has participated in various workshops and workshops on Ancient Greek and Roman scientific writing. She has authored books such as Ptolemy’s Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy’s Astronomy (1993), Ancient Meteorology (2003), and Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome (2008). In 2024, a festschrift was published in her honour. Tools, Techniques, and Technologies. Essays in Ancient Science and its Reception in Honour of Liba Taub was edited by Laurence Totelin and Emma Perkins, and published by De Gruyter.