Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is a scientific research institute founded in March 1994. It is dedicated to addressing fundamental questions of the history of knowledge from the Neolithic era to the present day, and its researchers pursue a historical epistemology in their study of how new categories of thought, proof, and experience have emerged in interactions between the sciences and their ambient cultures.
Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making. Gigerenzer is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam, and vice president of the European Research Council (ERC).
Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian historian and leading scholar of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named after Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity. He is the author of the seminal Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000).
Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.
Peter Louis Galison is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University.
In science, objectivity refers to attempts to do higher quality research by eliminating personal biases, irrational emotions and false beliefs, while focusing mainly on proven facts and evidence. It is often linked to observation as part of the scientific method. It is thus intimately related to the aim of testability and reproducibility. To be considered objective, the results of measurement must be communicated from person to person, and then demonstrated for third parties, as an advance in a collective understanding of the world. Such demonstrable knowledge has ordinarily conferred demonstrable powers of prediction or technology.
Theodore M. Porter is a historian of science emeritus in the Department of History at UCLA. He is known for his histories of statistical thinking and quantification, particularly the sociology of quantification.
The Tarner lectures are a series of public lectures in the philosophy of science given at Trinity College, Cambridge since 1916. Named after Mr Edward Tarner, the lecture addresses 'the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Relations or Want of Relations between the different Departments of Knowledge.' The inaugural lecture was given by Alfred North Whitehead in the autumn of 1919 and are published as his "The concept of nature."
Hans Joas is a German sociologist and social theorist.
The Pfizer Award is awarded annually by the History of Science Society "in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science" that was "published in English during a period of three calendar years immediately preceding the year of competition."
Katharine Park is an American historian of science. She is the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science emerita at Harvard University. She specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, and the female body in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as well as categories and practices of experience and observation in the Middle Ages. Park was awarded a Marshall Scholarship in 1974. She received her M.Phil in the Combined Historical Studies of the Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and earned a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard in 1981.
Jens Beckert is a German sociologist with a strong interest in economic sociology. The author of books on inherited wealth and the social foundations of economic efficiency and imagined futures in the economy, he focuses on the role of the economy in society – especially based on studies of markets – as well as organizational sociology, the sociology of inheritance, and sociological theory. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Dagmar Schäfer is a German sinologist and historian of science. She is director of Department III, Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She is honorary professor for the history of technology, Technische Universität Berlin; adjunct professor, Institute of Sinology, Freie Universität, Berlin, and Tianjin University (2018–2021). She was previously a guest professor at the school of history and culture of science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She was also the director of the Centre for Chinese Studies and held the professorial chair of Chinese studies, both at the University of Manchester.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is a Liechtensteiner historian of science. He was director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1997 to 2014. His focus areas within the history of science are the history and epistemology of the experiment, and further the history of molecular biology and protein biosynthesis. Additionally he writes and publicizes essays and poems.
Michael Dan Gordin is an American science historian and Slavist.
Cecelia Watson is an American author, and a historian and philosopher of science.
Erwin Nick Hiebert was a Canadian-American physical chemist and historian of science. He taught numerous students who would go on to become leading figures in the history of science, particularly women such as Carolyn Merchant and Mary Jo Nye, during academic tenures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University. He contributed to the Manhattan Project as a research chemist before becoming a historian.
