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Owen Gingerich
Owen Gingerich is Professor of Astronomy and History of Science Emeritus at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics. In his three-decades-long search for 16th-century copies of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, he probably visited more libraries than all the rest of the CfA staff put together. (Some of his adventures are described in The Book Nobody Read, an account of the making of his An Annotated Census of Coperncius’ De revolutionibus.) In January 2005 he gave the annual lecture of the Bibliographical Society of America, and in March he will inaugurate a new library lecture series at Syracuse University. A redoubtable collector of early astronomy, he has assembled a library of 16th and 17th-century ephemerides rivaled only by the Biblioth?que Nationale in Paris. His collection also contains books formerly owned by Harlow Shapley, Norman Lockyer, George Biddell Airy, John Herscel, Charles Messier, Edmond Halley, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed, Thomas Digges, John Dee, and Erasmus Reinhold.