Gerald James Whitrow

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Gerald James Whitrow ( June 9, 1912, Kimmeridge, Dorset - June 2, 2000) was a British mathematician, cosmologist and science historian.

After completing school at Christ's Hospital, he obtained a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford in 1930, earning his first degree in 1933, the MA in 1937, and the PhD in 1939. At Oxford he worked on an alternative theory of relativity with Professor Edward Arthur Milne. After the war, he taught at the Imperial College, London, first as a Lecturer, then as Reader of Applied Mathematics (1951), and as Professor of the History of Mathematics in 1972. Following his 1979 retirement, he was Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow of the Imperial College. For much of his life he was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1971 he was among the founders of the British Society for the History of Science.

His main contributions were in the fields of cosmology and astrophysics, but his interests included the history and philosophy of science, with a particular focus on the concept of time. Among his publications, The Natural Philosophy of Time received special attention.

[edit] Bibliography

Books:

  • 1959 (1949). The Structure of the Universe.
  • 1973 (1956). Atoms and the Universe (with G.O. Jones and J. Rotblat). Penguin Books.
  • 1959. The Structure and Evolution of the Universe. London: Hutchinson.
  • 1960. Rival Theories of Cosmology (with Herman Bondi, W. B. Bonner and R. A. Lyttleton).
  • 1980 (1960). The Natural Philosophy of Time. Oxford Univ. Press.
  • 1972. What is Time?.
  • 1975. The Nature of Time. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  • 1986. Einstein, the Man and his Achievement. Dover.
  • 1988. Time in History. Oxford University Press.

Articles:

  • 1967, "Reflections on the Natural Philosophy of Time," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 138: 422-32.
  • 1979, "Mathematical Time and Its Role in the Development of the Scientific World-View" in Greenway, Frank, ed., Time and the Sciences. Paris: UNESCO: 21-37.
  • 1973, "Time and Measurement," Dictionary of the History of Ideas. [1]

[edit] References

  • James, F. A. J. L., 2001, "Gerald James Whitrow (1912-2000)" (obituary), Astronomy & Astrophysics 42": 2.35-2.38.
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