Salomon Bochner, 20 August 1899 - 2May 1982
Salomon Bochner's publishing career in the history of science 
began in 1962 with an article entitled "The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Mechanics," in American Scientist. He was nearing the end of an extraordinarily productive career as a mathematician, having to his credit at that point almost two hundred papers and a number of books on various aspects of mathematical analysis. Four years later Princeton University Press published his main contribution to the history of science, The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science, a collection of essays and biographical sketches. Thereafter Bochner went on to publish Eclosion and Synthesis: Perspectives on the History of Knowledge (1969) and about a score of articles on the history of science.
Bochner was born in Krakow (then Austria-Hungary, now Poland) in 1899. After receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Berlin in 1921, he worked with Harald Bohr in Copenhagen, G. H. Hardy in Oxford, and J. E. Littlewood in Cambridge from 1924 to 1926. In 1926 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Munich. In 1933 he came to the United States and spent the next thirty-five years at Princeton University, where from 1951 until his retirement he was Henry Burchard Fine Professor of Mathematics. In 1968 Bochner became Edgar O'Dell Lovett Professor of Mathematics at Rice University and served for seven years as the chairman of the Mathematics Department. He remained active in departmental affairs until his death in 1982. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and served as vice-president of the American Mathematical Society, which awarded him the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1979 for the cumulative effect of his researches.
Bochner's contributions to the history of science can be put under two headings, space and periodization. Under the first, the rise of functions, the origin of mathematical background space, the contrast between place and space, and the problem of three-dimensionality in science all stemmed from his work in analysis. Under the second, he attempted to differentiate periods in science according to their peculiar thought patterns (see e.g., Eclosion and Synthesis). This latter concern was due, no doubt, to that fact that he grew up during the revolution in physics that intellectually separates the nineteenth from the twentieth century. In fact, at the time of his death he was writing a book on the essential differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century modes of thought.
During his term at Rice University, Bochner was a major intellectual force on campus. His public lectures, especially his assessment of Einstein on Einstein's hundredth birthday, were intellectual occasions of note. They finally led to the foundation of Scientia, an institute for the history of science and culture. This institute now has six members from various departments on campus and serves as the focal point for the history of science at Rice, sponsoring seminars and lectures. A lecture series named after Bochner was inaugurated on 23 February 1983 by I. Bernard Cohen. Joseph Needham delivered the second Bochner lecture on 27 October 1983.
Albert Van Helden
(Reprinted with permission from Isis, 74 (1983): 565)
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