L. Pearce Williams

Leslie Pearce Williams (born 1927) is the emeritus John Stambaugh Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University's Department of History, where he is also director of the program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Besides publishing a number of books, he has written three Encyclopædia Britannica articles.^[1][2] His birth name is Leslie Greenberg. He is the brother of Charles Williams, the long-time business manager of the Cornell Alumni News.

He graduated from Cornell in 1948.

Williams was an outspoken conservative during the campus unrest era of the 1960s. He was a leading advocate of maintaining ROTC on the Cornell campus,^[3] of compulsory physical education, and of removing Dale Corson as Cornell President because of an alleged decline in academic standards.

Williams along with E. A. Burtt and twenty-three other Cornell University professors was a volunteer faculty member of Ithaca Neighborhood College.^[4]

Works

• Michael Faraday, a biography (1965, 1987), Chapman & Hall
• The origins of field theory (1966, 1980), Random House
• Relativity theory; its origins and impact on modern thought (1968, 1979), John Wiley & Sons
• The nineteenth century (1978), Scribner
• The history of science in Western civilization (1978), authored with Henry John Steffens, University Press of America, 1977, Volumes I, II, and III
• Great issues in Western Civilization. Random House, 1967 and 1972. Volumes I and II. Eds. Brian Tierney, Donald Kagan, and L. Pearce Williams.
• "Normal Science, Scientific Revolutions and the History of Science" (pages 49–50) in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, Editors Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, Cambridge University Press, 1970, ISBN 0521096235, 282 pages
• Historiography of Victorian Science (1966) (paper)

External links

• His faculty profile at Cornell University
• Volume 90, Issue 12, 14 September 1973. Page 1], [http://cdsun.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/newscornell?a=d&d=CDS19730914.1.16&e=--------20--1-----all Page 16 of the Cornell Daily Sun
• "Did Egypt Originate Geometry Theorem?". February 14, 1991. New York Times.
• History of Science, Vol. 18, p.68-74. 1980. Williams, L. P. Review of The Essential Tension by Thomas Kuhn.
• Friday, Aug. 13, 1965. Brief Time Magazine review of Williams' Michael Faraday (Basic Books, 1965)
• "Books: Saint of Science". Jul. 23, 1965. Three page Time Magazine review of Williams' Michael Faraday (Basic Books, 1965)

References