| | 1 | Name: | Dr. James Gilbert Baker | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1970 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | June 29, 2005 | | | | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Owen Gingerich | | | Institution: | Harvard University & Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | May 28, 2023 | | | | | | |
Owen Gingerich is a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University. In 1992-93 he chaired Harvard's History of Science Department. Professor Gingerich's research interests have ranged from the recomputation of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation of stellar spectra. In the past four decades Professor Gingerich has become a leading authority on the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus. His publications include a 600-page monograph surveying copies of Copernicus' great book De revolutionibus, for which he was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981; later an asteroid was named in his honor. In 2006 he published God's Universe, a volume arguing that faith and science can coexist even in considerations of the nature of life. In 1984 he won the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching. In June 2007 he was awarded the Prix Janssen by the French Astronomical Society. He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1975.
In June 2017 he received Benedict Polak Prize, which he described this way: "I have just returned from Poland, where I have received the Benedict Polak Prize, which I daresay no other APS member has ever heard of. Friar Benedict the Pole was drafted in 1245 as a translator-scholar to accompany a Papal group to visit the Khan of Mongolia. The present Benedict Polak Prize was established three years ago to honor explorers in any realm of human knowledge, and is to be given each year to a Polish citizen and to a foreigner. I received this year's prize for my Copernican researches. The Polish citizen prize went to my friend Jerzy Gassowski, the archaeologist who identified Copernicus' bones in an unmarked grave under the cathedral floor in Frombork. The prizes are given in Leczyca, a small village with the founding church in Poland and the church home of Benedict the Pole. It is hard to imagine that enough citizens of Leczyca would turn up for such an occasion, but actually people came from all over Poland. The president of Poland was not present in person, but sent a citation as well as a private and specific congratulatory letter to me." | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Robert P. Kirshner | | | Institution: | Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory; Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Robert Kirshner is best known for his observational studies of supernovae, which helped provide the scientific grounding for the teams investigating these extraordinarily distant lighthouses, and this in turn led to the surprising conclusion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, probably the most significant cosmological discovery of the past decade. His previous work included important research on the large scale distribution of galaxies. A lively and entertaining lecturer, he teaches Harvard University's largest core course in the mathematical sciences. When applying for graduate school at Harvard, he was denied admission on the grounds that he was interested in too many things to be serious about astronomy; he later became Chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department, and he is president of the American Astronomical Society. Dr. Kirshner presently holds the titles of Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University and Master of Quincy House at Harvard College. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the California Institute of Technology and was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1992 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received the James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 and the Wolf Prize in 2015. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. James M. Moran | | | Institution: | Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
James Moran is currently Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Donald H. Menzel Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. He has spent most of his career at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard University.
James Moran has led a decades long program which has directly established the geometric scale of the universe and provided the first direct evidence for the existence of supermassive black holes. These exquisite observations began with Moran’s 1967 pioneering work in the development of Very Long Baseline spectral line interferometry and culminated with his observations of cosmic H2O maser sources to obtain the direct geometric distance to a galaxy, independent of traditional multiple step extragalactic distance ladder and its uncertain metallicity corrections. The extragalactic distance scale is a key ingredient in establishing the equation state of dark matter as well as being an essential prerequisite for the determination of the age, energy density, synthesis of the light elements, geometry, and the evolution of the universe. The current “tension” between the maser/Cepheid/supernova and Planck values of the Hubble constant, 73.24p/m1.74 and 67.8p/m0.9 respectively, depends fundamentally on these direct geometric measurements.
James Moran was awarded the Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1971, the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 1978, and the Grote Reber Gold Medal in 2013. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union (president, Division X and Commission 40, 1997-2000), the National Academy of Sciences (1998), and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2010). James Moran was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Irwin I. Shapiro | | | Institution: | Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University & Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | | | | |
Irwin Shapiro formerly directed the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, arguably the world's largest astronomical research institution, and has been Timken University Professor at Harvard since 1997 and Schlumberger Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1985. He proposed and, with colleagues, verified the fourth test of general relativity, now called the "Shapiro effect." With a former student he initiated the revolution in geodesy based on the use of GPS signals to determine via interferometry the vector distance between points on the Earth with errors at the millimeter level. Strongly advocating improved pre-college science teaching, he has sponsored a cutting-edge educational group at the Center for Astrophysics and has guided the preparation of imaginative new texts and hands-on materials. Dr. Shapiro holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard (1955) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1969); the National Academy of Sciences (1974); and the American Astronomical Society (division chairman, 1970-71) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Geophysical Union; and the American Physical Society. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1998. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Patrick Thaddeus | | | Institution: | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | April 28, 2017 | | | | | | |
Pat Thaddeus’ astronomy research career centered on molecules. His pioneering and sophisticated laboratory methods of generating exotic molecules that might be observable in space, and measuring their spectra so as to be able to find these molecules in space through these microwave spectral signatures, enabled him to be without peer in this field. He and his group have thus discovered approximately 20 percent of the approximate 160 molecules now known to exist in interstellar space. His most important discoveries ranged from (unexpected) long carbon-chain molecules to (even more unexpected) negative ions, all of which have had a major impact on our understanding of the chemistry of interstellar space. He and his group have also conducted truly unique large-scale surveys of interstellar carbon monoxide which is a proxy for the difficult to observe hydrogen molecule; the high point of these surveys was the production of an exquisite, detailed map of our galaxy in three dimensions (radial velocity as well as sky coordinates), which now adorns walls in observatories world wide and has led to many further advances in our understanding of the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy. He earned his Ph.D. in 1960 from Columbia University. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987 and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1989, and received the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2001 and the Sir Harold Thompson Memorial Award in 2002. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. Patrick Thaddeus died April 28, 2017, at the age of 84. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Fred L. Whipple | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1956 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | August 30, 2004 | | | | |
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