Noel Swerdlow

Swerdlow specializes in the history of exact sciences, astronomy in particular, from antiquity through the 17th century.[1] He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1968; his doctoral dissertation, Ptolemy's Theory of the Distances and Sizes of the Planets: A Study of The Scientific Foundations of Medieval Cosmology, was supervised by Asger Aaboe.[3]

In 1984, Swerdlow, with co-author Otto E. Neugebauer, published Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, Springer. ISBN 978-1-4613-8262-1 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.

In 1988 Swerdlow received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."[2] In the same year he published the book The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (Princeton University Press).

In 1988 he was also elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, dating to 1743.[4]

• Hipparchus On Sizes and Distances

• Guide to the Noel M. Swerdlow Collection 1967-1971 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center