Noel Swerdlow

Noel Mark Swerdlow (9 September 1941 – 24 July 2021 ) was a professor emeritus of history, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology.

Career Swerdlow specialized in the history of exact sciences, astronomy in particular, from antiquity through the 17th century.

Publications

The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus's Planetary Theory: A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary by Noel M. Swerdlow in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 117, No. 6, Symposium on Copernicus (Dec. 31, 1973), pp. 423–512 (90 pages)

In 1984, Swerdlow, with co-author Otto E. Neugebauer, published Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, Springer. a two volume investigation of the sources and methods of that pivotal work in the development of astronomy that first laid out a heliocentric theory of the Solar System.

The Babylonian Theory of the Planets by N. M. Swerdlow | Princeton University Press | 1998 |

Otto E. Neugebauer 1899–1990 A Biographical Memoir by N. M. Swerdlow published by the National Academies Press for the National Academy of Sciences | 1998

An essay on Thomas Kuhn's First Scientific Revolution, "The Copernican Revolution" in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 148, No. 1, March 2004 (pp. 64–120)

In 1988 Swerdlow received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."