born July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
died June 17, 1996, Cambridge, Mass.
U.S. historian and philosopher of science.
He taught at Berkeley (195664), Princeton (196479), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (197991). In his highly influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), he questioned the previously accepted view of scientific progress as a gradual accumulation of knowledge based on universally valid experimental methods and results, claiming that progress was often achieved by far-reaching "paradigm shifts." His other works include The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension (1977), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978).