Noel M. Swerdlow, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Department of History, and the College, passed away July 24, 2021. He was 80.

"Born in 1941, Noel M. Swerdlow received a B.A. (1964) in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. (1967) and PhD (1968) in medieval studies from Yale University. He joined the History Department at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor in 1969, and served as professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago from 1982 until 2010, when he was named Professor Emeritus. He also spent time as a visiting Associate Professor in History at Caltech in 2008 and from 2010 to 2018.

His research focused on the history of the exact sciences from antiquity through the seventeenth century as well as the history of astronomy. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1973, 1985), was elected to membership of the American Philosophical Society in 1988, and received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1988 at age 47 largely due to his research on early astronomy and its technical aspects, which proved instrumental in integrating a highly specialized topic into broader studies of science, culture, and history.

Some of the works Swerdlow published include The Commentariolus (1973), in which he translated and explored Copernicus’s early astronomical work; Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1984), which he co-wrote with O. Neugebauer; and The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (1998)."

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NB: The excerpt above is taken from The University of Chicago Library's Guide to the Noel M. Swerdlow Collection, 1967-1971.