Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Jenifer Daston (born June 9, 1951) is an American historian of science and philosopher. She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and an authority on early modern Europe's scientific and intellectual history. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2025.

Early life and education Daston was born in 1951 in East Lansing, Michigan, to parents of Greek heritage, who named her for the muse Urania. and Erwin N. Hiebert, with the thesis The Reasonable Calculus: Classical Probability Theory 1650-1840. There she met her husband-to-be Gerd Gigerenzer and began a complex series of professional moves to handle their academic two-body problem. In 2006, she gave the British Academy's Master-Mind Lecture. Daston was appointed the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford for 2012–2013. She has also served as Oxford's Isaiah Berlin Lecturer in the History of Ideas April–May 1999.

Daston has been awarded two Pfizer Awards from the History of Science Society, in 1989 for her 1988 book Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and again in 1999 for her 1998 book with Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. Daston was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010. She won the 2012 George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement in the history of science. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Princeton University in 2013. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017. In 2018, she received the Dan David Prize. In the Fall of 2019, Daston was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden. She is currently a member of the Academic Senate at the same institute. In 2024 she was awarded the Balzan Prize for "History of Modern and Contemporary Science".

She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry. She is a contributor to the London Review of Books.

Personal life Daston married the German psychologist and social scientist Gerd Gigerenzer, with whom she has a daughter. Zone Books 2004. with Fernando Vidal: The Moral Authority of Nature, University of Chicago Press 2003. Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press 2000. with Lorenz Krüger and Michael Heidelberger: The Probabilistic Revolution, Vol. 1: Ideas in History, MIT Press 1987.

Articles

with Moritz Stefaner & Jen Christiansen: "The language of science". 175 Years of Discovery. Scientific American. 323 (3): 2020, 24–31. "Before the Two Cultures: Big Science and Big Humanities in the Nineteenth Century". Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. IX (1): 2015. brief description, Bookstore, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities "The Disciplines of Attention," in David E. Wellbery, ed., A New History of German Literature, Harvard University Press Reference Library, 2005. "The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea" and "Nature's Customs versus Nature's Laws". Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, 2002. "The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment". Science in Context. 4 (2): 1991, pp. 367–386. "Degrees of Wrinkledness". London Review of Books, 46 (21). [A review of the book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology'' by Gregory Radick, The University of Chicago Press, 2023.]