Derek DeSolla Price

Derek De Solla Price (1922-1983) was an English American historian of science.

Derek de Solla Price with a model of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek model of the solar system.

Life

Derek John De Solla Price was born on January 22, 1922 in Leyton, a suburb of London. He earned a B.A. with honors in physics and mathematics from the University of London in 1942, then worked on wartime research projects. Price received a PhD in experimental physics at the University of London in 1946, the went to Pittsburgh and Princeton on a fellowship. In 1948, Price began teaching at Raffles College, which became part of the National University of Singapore. There he read a set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and became aware of the evolutionary nature and the historical aspects of science and technology. He also developed his theory of the exponential growth of scientific literature.

Price returned to England and obtained a second doctorate, in the history of science, from Cambridge University in 1954. He worked at Princeton and the Smithsonian Institution before he secured a professorship at Yale University. In 1959 he joined the department of history at Yale. In 1960, Price joined the new Department of History of Science and Medicine and soon became chair.

In the prospectus for the new department, Price elaborated on the exponential growth of scientific literature and tied it to the increased number of indexing and abstracting services. Derek Price died in September 1983 in London.

Contributions

In addition to his studies of ancient instruments, Price was as a major promoter of and contributor to the study of quantitative patters in publication (bibliometrics) and science (scientometrics). He had a substantial influence in the popularization of the history of science and technology.

Publications

For a full list his publications and some unpublished papers see the Bibliographic Appendix in Yagi, Badash, & Beaver (1966, 76-83). The Wikipedia lists numerous publications. [1]

• Heavenly clockwork : the great astronomical clocks of medieval China. With Joseph Needham & Wang Ling. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960. 2nd ed., 1986.
• Science since Babylon New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961. New ed., 1975. A prospectus for the new department at Yale and for his personal goals in the history of science.
• "Networks of Scientific Papers." Science 149 (July 30, 1965): 510-515. Reprinted in Kochen, The Growth of Knowledge. Huntington, NY: Wiley, 1967.
• Little Science, Big Science NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965. New ed. 1986. Lectures on the "science of science."
• "Is technology historically independent of science? A study in statistical historiography." Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 553-568.
• "Collaboration in an invisible college." With D. De B. Beaver. American Psychologist 21, no. 11 (1966): 1011.
• "Communication in science: The ends -- Philosophy and forecast. In: Communication in Science: Documentation and Automation, ed. by A. de Reuck & J. Knight. London : J. & A. Churchill, 1967, pp 199-213.
• "Gears from the Greeks. The Antikythera mechanism: a calendar computer from ca. 80 BC." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Jan 1, 1974): 1-70.
• "A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes." Journal of the American society for Information Science 27, no. 5 (1976): 292-306.

Awards

• Society for Social Studies of Science. J. D. Bernal Award, 1981.
• American Society for Information Science. Reserach Award, 1984.
• International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics confers the biennial Derek John de Solla Price Memorial Medal.

Further reading

• Herner, Saul. "Price, Derek de Solla (1922-1983)." Supplement to the Dictionary of American library biography, ed. by Wayne A. Wiegand. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1990, pp 98-101.
• Yagi, Eri, Lawrence Badash, & Donald de B. Beaver. "Derek J. de S. Price (1922–83) Historian of science and herald of scientometrics." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 21, Issue 1 (March 1996): 1-88. [2]

Papers

• Price's library and papers were deposited at the Musée National des Sciences, des Techniques, et des Industries, Paris, France.
• Adler Planetarium, Chicago, IL. Derek J. de Solla Price Papers. [3]