Owen Gingerich
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Owen Gingerich (born 1930) is an American astronomer and historian of science.
He was born in Washington, Iowa to a Mennonite family and studied at Goshen College and Harvard University. He was raised on the prairies of Kansas and it was there he became interested in astronomy. This led him to teach astronomy at Harvard where his lectures became noted for attention getting devices. Amongst these was using fire extinguishers to demonstrated Newtonian laws or dressing up like a sixteenth century Latin scholar. He also is associated with Smithsonian.
In addition to astronomical research, he has also studied the history of astronomy. His three-decade-long personal survey of Copernicus' great book De revolutionibus gained him the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981, and more recently an asteroid has been named in his honor. He recounted that search in The Book Nobody Read. published in 2004 by Walker & Co.
The asteroid 2658 Gingerich is named after him.
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