Science Biographies Research Articles

Using Science Biographies to Understand Science: Why and How?

Using Science Biographies to Understand Science: Why and How?

«Избави нас бог жить в интересные времена…»

The review is dedicated to the first in our historical science biography of the historian P. G. Lybomirova. It is noted that the authors of the monograph highly professionally investigated the contribution of P. G. Lyubomirova in domestic historiography. The review analyzes the main ideas and scientific approaches of the authors of the biography.

Intersections of life histories and science identities: the stories of three preservice elementary teachers

ABSTRACTGrounded within Connelly and Clandinin’s conceptualization of teachers’ professional identity in terms of ‘stories to live by’ and through a life-history lens, this multiple case study aimed to respond to the following questions: (a) How do three preservice elementary teachers view themselves as future science teachers? (b) How have the participants’ life histories shaped their science identity trajectories? In order to characterize the participants’ formation of science identities over time, various data regarding their life histories in relation to science were collected: science biographies, self-portraits, interviews, reflective journals, lesson plans, and classroom observations. The analysis of the data illustrated how the three participants’ identities have been in formation from the early years of their lives and how various events, experiences, and interactions had shaped their identities through time and across contexts. These findings are discussed alongside implications for theory, specifically, identity and life-history intersections, for teacher preparation, and for research related to explorations of beginning elementary teachers’ identity trajectories.

The Pasteurization of Marie Curie: A (meta)biographical experiment.

Biographies of scientists occupy a liminal space, highly popular with general readers but questioned in academia. Nonetheless, in recent years, historians of science have not only embraced the genre with more enthusiasm and less guilt, they have also turned to the metabiography in order to renew the study and story of scientists' roles. This essay focuses on Marie Curie, the world's most famous female scientist, in order to unpack some of the theoretical and methodological claims of the science biography, and especially to address the sexing mechanisms at play in the construction of the biographical subject. Pierre Curie (1923), Marie's biography of her husband Pierre, paid tribute to her dead husband and collaborator, but also allowed Curie a legitimate outlet to construct her own persona and legacy. Categories such as personhood, person, and persona are not only central to the biography genre but also are essential to the sense of self and self-fashioning of scientists. Looking at how Marie Curie negotiated these categories in Pierre Curie not only gives new insight into Curie's self-fashioning strategies but may also shed some light on the more general analytical lacunae of the science biography.

Biography: The scientist within

Richard Holmes celebrates today's revival of science biography, a tradition spanning 300 years.

Albert Einstein (review)

Reviewed by: Albert Einstein Elizabeth Bush Krull, Kathleen. Albert Einstein; illus. by Boris Kulikov. Viking, 2009 141p. (Giants of Science) ISBN 978-0-670-06332-1 $15.99 R Gr. 5-8 Krull and her Giants of Science return to trample the middle-school science biography competition, this time focusing on the man who became the twentieth-century eponym for genius. With her customary aplomb at airing the foibles of mighty minds, she dashes a couple of Einstein myths (e.g., he wasn't really such a horrible student in his younger days) and revels in the many eccentricities he so generously provided his biographers. That, though, is the easy part. If Krull had a challenge explicating Newtonian physics (in Isaac Newton, BCCB 5/06), one can only imagine the horrors of taking on breakthrough ideas of space and time. Rather than thrashing her way around concepts relatively (no pun intended) few adults comprehend, she gives it a livelier-than-textbook effort, and then assures her audience that they [End Page 203] shouldn't feel too bad if they don't understand it—not many people do. One would think that all visual caricatures of Einstein have already been executed, but Kulikov nonetheless brings energy and imagination to bear on his subject. Einstein and his later-to-be-discarded wife Mileva embrace on a mountaintop, reading physics papers over each other's shoulders; his famously explosive hair whirls out into a vortex of space as he contemplates his alarm clock. Kids (or their teachers) who insist upon a takeaway physics lesson can quote the most concise summary Einstein offered of his theory of relativity: "It's a theory of space and time as far as physics is concerned, which leads to a theory of gravitation." Now do you get it? Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Going to school with Madame Curie and Mr. Einstein: gender roles in children’s science biographies

One of the first places children encounter science and scientists is children’s literature. Children’s books about science and scientists have, however, received limited scholarly attention. By exploring the history of children’s biographies of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, the two most written about scientist in children’s literature, this paper taps this unutilized resource to cultivate a unique perspective on the history of gender and authority in science and science education. Through analysis of explicit discussions of womanhood and science and implicit gendering of Curie and Einstein’s school experiences within these books, this study demonstrates that while much has changed in how these stories are framed the gender of the scientist is still central to how they are represented in children’s literature.

Inside the economist's mind: conversations with eminent economists

Coeditor's Foreword: Reflections on How Biographies of Individual Scholars Can Relate to a Science's Biography (Paul A. Samuelson). Coeditor's Preface: An Overview of the Objectives and Contents of the Volume (William A. Barnett). History of Thought Introduction: Economists Talking with Economists, An Historian's Perspective (E. Roy Weintraub) Interviews: 1. An Interview with Wassily Leontief (Interviewed by Duncan K. Foley). 2. An Interview with David Cass (Interviewed jointly by Stephen E. Spear and Randall Wright). 3. An Interview with Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (Interviewed by Bennett T. McCallum). 4. An Interview with Janos Kornai (Interviewed by Olivier Blanchard). 5. An Interview with Franco Modigliani (Interviewed by William A. Barnett and Robert Solow). 6. An Interview with Milton Friedman (Interviewed by John B. Taylor). 7. An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (Interviewed by William A. Barnett). 8. An Interview with Paul A. Volcker (Interviewed by Perry Mehrling). 9. An Interview with Martin Feldstein (Interviewed by James M. Poterba). 10. An Interview with Christopher A. Sims (Interviewed by Lars Peter Hansen). 11. An Interview with Robert J. Shiller (Interviewed by John Y. Campbell). 12. An Interview with Stanley Fischer (Interviewed by Olivier Blanchard). 13. An Interview with Jacques Dreze (Interviewed by Pierre Dehez and Omar Licandro). 14. An Interview with Thomas J. Sargent (Interviewed by George W. Evans and Seppo Honkapohja). 15. An Interview with Robert Auman (Interviewed by Sergiu Hart). 16. Conversations with James Tobin and Robert Shiller on the Yale Tradition in Macroeconomics (Conducted by David Colander).

How Are Scientists Portrayed in Children’s Science Biographies?

The goal of this study is to analyze the images of science and scientists in science biographies written for children. We examined 12 biographies of historic and contemporary scientists written for primary/middle school children in relation to three dimensions: characteristics of scientists, nature and process of scientific knowledge, and social processes of science. Biographies of historic scientists were characterized by a relative absence of description of how scientists arrived at their knowledge especially in books addressing younger readers. Biographies of contemporary scientists showed richer descriptions of experimental science with limited attention to connections between evidence and theory. Findings reinforce the need for teachers to guide students in their critical reading of biographies and provide additional resources to help them construct a richer understanding of the nature of science

Telling lives in science: essays on scientific biography

List of contributors Preface Introduction Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo 1. Existential projects and existential choice in science: science biography as an edifying genre Thomas Soderqvist 2. Life paths: autobiography, science and the French Revolution Dorinda Outram 3. From science to wisdom: Humphry Davy's life David Knight 4. Robert Boyle and the dilemma of biography in the age of the scientific revolution Michael Hunter 5. Alphabetical lives: scientific biography in historical dictionaries and encyclopedias Richard Yeo 6. The scientist as hero: public images of Michael Faraday Geoffrey Cantor 7. Tactful organising and executive power: biographies of Florence Nightingale for girls Martha Vicinus 8. Taking histories, medical lives: Thomas Beddoes and biography Roy Porter 9. The scientist as patron and patriotic symbol: the changing reputation of Joseph Banks John Gascoigne 10. Metabiographical reflections on Charles Darwin James Moore Index.

Book reviews: Immaterial beings or substantiated experiments?

A. Rupert Hall, Henry More. Magic, Religion and Experiment . Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Pp. 304, £30.00. ISBN 0631172955 On first acquaintance it may appear strange that the 17th-century Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, should earn a place in the hall of fame represented by the Blackwell Science Biographies. Among such giants as Galileo and Newton, Lavoisier and Darwin, where stands this stalwart defender of Christianity, this seemingly credulous champion of a hidden world of spirits, a conservative thinker who joined forces with Joseph Glanvill to publicize the reality of witchcraft, a member of the Royal Society to be sure, but one who, in Professor Hall’s own words, was a wholly inactive Fellow? Described by one contemporary as the ‘Holiest Person upon the Face of the Earth’, More has enjoyed a place in the history of religious thought as an opponent of sectarian enthusiasm and architect of a more ‘latitudinarian’ creed. But what are we to make of a man who valued the experiments conducted under the aegis of the Royal Society precisely because they were ‘serviceable ... to the clear knowledge and Demonstration of the Existence of immaterial Beings’?