Name Charles Gillispie | ||
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Died October 6, 2015, Princeton, New Jersey, United States Education Harvard University (1949), Wesleyan University Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada, Dartmouth Medal Books Edge of Objectivity, Science and polity in France, Genesis and geology, Pierre‑Simon Laplace - 1749‑1827, The Montgolfier brothers | ||
Charles Coulston Gillispie (; August 6, 1918 – October 6, 2015) was an American historian of science, and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science, Emeritus at Princeton University.
The son of Raymond Livingston Gillispie and Virginia Coulston, Gillispie grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He attended Wesleyan University, graduating in 1940 with a major in Chemistry and gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1949. He also served in the U.S. Army during World War II.
Gillispie joined the Department of History at Princeton University, establishing the Program in History of Science at Princeton in the 1960s. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1965-66. He headed the editorial board of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, for which he received the Dartmouth Medal in 1981. Gillispie also received the Pfizer Award in 1981. He was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society in 1984 and the Balzan Prize in 1997 for "the extraordinary contribution he has made to the history and philosophy of science by his intellectually vigorous, precise works, as well as his editing of a great reference work". On October 6, 2015, he died at the age of 97.