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HARRY WOOLF was many things in his career, but primarily he was a historian of science. That is how I knew him beginning as one of his graduate students in the 1960s, and it is how I should like to remember him here.
Born in Brooklyn on 12 August 1923, Harry served in the United States Army in World War II, receiving three Bronze Stars. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Chicago in physics and history, going on to Cornell, where he received his doctorate in the history of science in 1955. While working for his doctorate, he taught physics at Boston University and history at Brandeis. In 1955, he became assistant professor at the University of Washington, departing in 1961 to be the Willis K. Shepard Professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University. He retained that chair until 1976, and from 1972 to 1976 also served as provost of Hopkins. From 1976 to 1987, he was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a period of substantial development for the Institute. In 1987, he became professor-at-large at the Institute, and in 1994 professor-at-large emeritus. He served on many boards and advisory committees in the business and academic worlds. He died in Princeton on 6 January 2003.
Written under the direction of Henry Guerlac, one of the principal founders of the history of science as an academic discipline in the United States, Harry's dissertation was published in 1959 as The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Science. Making substantial use of archival material in France and Britain, Transits explored the efforts of individuals and scientific societies to observe the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 in various parts of the world. Not mainly a study of scientific ideas, it conveyed instead an understanding of the organization, time, and luck required for such observations to succeed. The review of Transits in Isis began, "Here is an exciting book."1 After noting Harry's "sure feel for the language"2 and explaining the book's significance, the review concluded with the "hope that the author will follow up this work with others which add as much to the history of science." 3
Despite such praise for his research, Harry...