The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996) was a philosopher of science whose ideas about the progress of knowledge found their classic expression in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn trained as a physicist at Harvard in the 1940s, and in the latter part of the Second World War he contributed to the development of radar technology. During a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard Kuhn began studying the history and philosophy of science, for which he would become famous. A course he taught there gave him the first systematic chance to work on the development of scientific thought since Aristotle. He later taught at the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; and, until his retirement in 1991, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy. Among the honors received by Kuhn in his lifetime were the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society (in 1982) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1954). His other books include The Copernican Revolution (1957) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1987), but it is the present book for which he has always been best known.

Ian Hacking is University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He received his BA degree from the University of British Columbia and MA and PhD from the University of Cambridge. His books include The Emergence of Probability (1975), Scientific Revolutions (1990), and, most recently, Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All? (2014). During a distinguished fifty-year career as a researcher and teacher, Hacking’s work on how statistics and probability have shaped society won numerous awards, including the Killam Prize, which is awarded to active Canadian scholars who have made a remarkable contribution to their field.

Marcus du Sautoy OBE is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, where he is also Professor of Mathematics and a Fellow of New College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a past recipient of the Faraday Prize, which is awarded by the Society for excellence in communicating science. His books include The Music of the Primes (2003), What We Cannot Know (2016), and The Creativity Code (2019).