I. Bernard Cohen Quotes

I. Bernard Cohen was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of many books on the history of science and, in particular, Isaac Newton.

Cohen was the first American to receive a PhD in history of science, was a Harvard undergraduate and then a PhD student and protégé of George Sarton who was the founder of Isis and the History of Science Society. Cohen taught at Harvard from 1942 until his death, and his tenure was marked by the development of Harvard's program in the history of science. He went on to succeed Sarton as editor of Isis and, later, president of the Society ; he was also a president of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science.

Cohen was an internationally recognized Newton scholar; his interests were encyclopedic, ranging from science and public policy to the history of computers, with several decades as a special consultant for history of computing with IBM. Among his hundreds of publications were such major books as Franklin and Newton , The Birth of a New Physics , The Newtonian Revolution , Revolution in Science , Science and the Founding Fathers , Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer , and his last book, The Triumph of Numbers , not to mention two jointly authored contributions, the variorum edition and new English translation of Newton's Principia.

Cohen's April 1955 interview with Albert Einstein was the last Einstein gave before his death, in that same month. It was published that July in Scientific American, which also published Cohen's 1984 essay on Florence Nightingale.

In 1974 he was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. Many consider Cohen's most important work to be his 1999 translation, with the late Anne Whitman, of Newton's Principia. This 974-page work took Cohen over 15 years to fully translate.

Among Cohen's students were the Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hosein Nasr, Tufts University professor George E. Smith, Bucknell University professor Martha Verbrugge, Allen G. Debus and Jeremy Bernstein.

He died of a bone marrow disorder. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. March 1914 – 20. June 2003
I. Bernard Cohen: 9   quotes 0   likes

Famous I. Bernard Cohen Quotes

“Of the many references to Newton in 18th-century electrical writings only a small number were to the Principia, the greater part by far were to the Opticks.”

This was true not alone of the electrical writings but also in other fields of experimental enquiry. ...[The Opticks] would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it. ...in the Opticks Newton did not adopt the motto... —Hypotheses non fingo; I frame no hypotheses—but, so to speak, let himself go, allowing his imagination full reign and by far exceeding the bounds of experimental evidence.
I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

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