CHARLES C. GILLISPIE ’40

CHARLES C. GILLISPIE, 97, the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and professor emeritus of the history of science at Princeton University, died Oct. 6, 2015. He was the son of Raymond L. Gillispie of the class of 1910, the brother of Robert L.J. Gillispie of the class of 1942, the nephew of Robert W. Gillispie of the class of 1904, and the cousin of David L. Gillispie of the class of 1939. He received his degree in chemistry with honors and with high distinction in history. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he was a member of Psi Upsilon. After graduation he remained at Wesleyan for his master’s degree in history. During World War II he served with the U.S. Army. Following the war, he returned to the study of history, joining Princeton University’s faculty and earning a PhD in history from Harvard University. A leading figure in the establishment of the history and philosophy of science as an academic discipline, he founded the Program in the History of Science at Princeton in the 1960s. He was the author of many books that have become classics in the field, including Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850; The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas; and Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science. He was also the editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, a monumental reference work in 16 volumes with more than 4,500 essays on scientists and mathematicians of all periods and nationalities, for which he received the Dartmouth Medal from the American Library Association in 1981. He co-authored his final work, Lazare and Sadi Carnot: A Scientific and Filial Relationship, which was published in 2014. His many awards and distinctions include the 1997 Balzan Prize for History and Philosophy of Science for “the extraordinary contribution he has made to the history and philosophy of science by his intellectually vigorous and exacting works.” He received the Pfizer Prize in 1981 from the History of Science Society for his book, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime, and the Sarton Medal in 1984. Among his other awards are the Dibner Award for Distinction in History of Science and Technology from MIT in 1994 and la Médaille Alexandre Koyré from the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences in 1985. In 1972 he was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, America’s oldest learned society. He received honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Wesleyan in 1971, from Lafayette College in 2001, and a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Princeton in 2011. His wife, Emily Clapp Gillispie, predeceased him.