Jacob Bronowski | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1908-01-18)18 January 1908 |
| Died | 22 August 1974(1974-08-22) (aged 66) East Hampton, New York, U.S. |
| Resting place | Highgate Cemetery, London, England |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Cambridge |
| Known for | The Ascent of Man |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 4, includingLisa Jardine |
| Awards | Senior wrangler (Cambridge) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics,operations research,biology,history of science,geometry |
| Institutions | Salk Institute |
| Doctoral advisor | H. F. Baker |
Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973BBC televisiondocumentary series, and accompanying book,The Ascent of Man. He was widely regarded as "one of the most revered intellectuals on the global stage."[1]
Bronowski's family moved fromCongress Poland to Germany and then to England in 1920, when he was 12 years old. He won a scholarship to study mathematics at theUniversity of Cambridge. His interests have been described as ranging "widely, from biology to poetry and from chess toHumanism".[2] He taught mathematics atUniversity College Hull between 1934 and 1942. DuringWorld War II he led the field ofoperations research and worked to increase the effectiveness of Allied bombing.
After the war Bronowski headed the projects division ofUNESCO. He wrote poetry and had a deep affinity forWilliam Blake. From 1950 to 1963 he worked for theNational Coal Board in the UK. From 1963 he was a resident fellow of theSalk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, until his death in 1974 inEast Hampton, New York, just a year after the airing of hisAscent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski was born to a Polish-Jewish family inŁódź,Congress Poland, in 1908. His family moved to Germany during theFirst World War, and to Britain in 1920, Bronowski's parents having been married in Britain in the London house of his maternal grandfather in 1907. Although, according to Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Britain,[3] he gained admission to theCentral Foundation Boys' School inLondon and went on to study mathematics at theUniversity of Cambridge, graduating asSenior Wrangler (best student mathematician) in 1930.[4]
As a mathematics student atJesus College, Cambridge, Bronowski co-edited – withWilliam Empson – the literary periodicalExperiment, which first appeared in 1928. Bronowski would pursue this sort of dual activity, in both the mathematical and literary worlds, throughout his professional life. He was also a strong chess player, earning ahalf-blue while at Cambridge and composing numerous chess problems for theBritish Chess Magazine between 1926 and 1970.[5] He received a PhD inmathematics at Cambridge in 1935, writing a dissertation inalgebraic geometry. For a time in the 1930s he lived nearLaura Riding andRobert Graves inMajorca. From 1934 to 1942, he taught mathematics at theUniversity College of Hull. Beginning in this period, the British secret serviceMI5 placed him under surveillance, believing he was a security risk,[6] which may have restricted his access to senior posts in the UK.
During theSecond World War, Bronowski worked inoperations research for the UK'sMinistry of Home Security, where he developed mathematical approaches to bombing strategy forRAF Bomber Command.
At the end of the war, Bronowski was part of a British team of scientists andcivil engineers who visitedJapan to document the effects of theatomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the purpose of studying the effects of the atomic bomb and its implications for future UKcivil defence. Bronowski, in conjunction with Professor W. N. Thomas ofCardiff University,[7] subsequently produced the secretReport of the British Mission to Japan: the Effects of the Atomic Bombs Dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,[8] which was passed to various government departments and consulted in the design of future UK public buildings. It was simultaneously published in the US.
Following his experiences of the after-effects of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, he discontinued his work for British military research and turned tobiology, as did his friendLeo Szilard, and many other physicists of that time, to better understand the nature of violence. Subsequently, Bronowski became Director of Research for theNational Coal Board in the UK, and an associate director of theSalk Institute from 1964.
In 1950, Bronowski was given theTaung Child's fossilised skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape to discriminate them from the teeth of apes.[9] Work on this turned his interests towards the biology of humanity's intellectual products.
In 1967 Bronowski delivered the sixSilliman Memorial Lectures atYale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge. Transcripts of the lectures were published posthumously in 1978 asThe Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and remain in print. He first became familiar to the British public through appearances on theBBC Television version ofThe Brains Trust in the late 1950s.
Bronowski is best remembered forThe Ascent of Man, a 13-part series about the history of human life and scientific endeavour. This project was commissioned byDavid Attenborough, then director of programmes for BBC Television, and was intended to complement two preceding series: art historianKenneth Clark's "personal view" seriesCivilisation (1969), which had covered cultural history, andAlistair Cooke's seriesAmerica: A Personal History of the United States (first broadcast in 1972).[10]
The documentary was described as "a landmark in television" and "lavishly produced and visually stunning, it impressed viewers with its lucidity and with the power of the presenter’s personality".[11]
In a personal scene filmed atAuschwitz concentration camp, where many Polish members of his family died duringthe Holocaust, Bronowski walks into the muddy waters where the ashes of his family were thrown, saying:
It is said that science willdehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false - tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality - this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.[12][13]
In an interview byMichael Parkinson conducted soon after the program was broadcast, Bronowski's recounted his visit toAuschwitz leading to Parkinson's describing the segment as one of the most memorable parts of any interview he had done.[14] Decades later and at the end of his career, Parkinson said: "if I could save one interview from the thousands I have done, it would be the one-man show with Professor Jacob Bronowski."[15]
Bronowski married Rita Coblentz in 1941.[16] The couple had four daughters, the eldest was the academicLisa Jardine and another is the filmmaker Judith Bronowski.[17]
He died in 1974 of a heart attack inEast Hampton, New York,[18] a year afterThe Ascent of Man was first broadcast.
In 1970, John Cleese says "I'm not Doctor bloody Bronowski!" in the Monty Python sketch, "Exploding Penguin on the TV Set". In 2011, on the reissue ofThe Ascent of Man with a foreword byRichard Dawkins,Tim Radford inThe Guardian described it "as compelling as ever".[19]
In 2013,Cambridge University Press published a critique,Jacob Bronowski: a humanist intellectual for an atomic age, 1946–1956, by the science historian Ralph Desmarais, who wrote: "Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator ... to fame on the BBC airwaves ... from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth", but "discussing atomic energy ... Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme."[20]
In 2015, theBritish Science Association launched The Jacob Bronowski Award Lecture at the British Science Festival in September, launched in partnership with theVictoria and Albert Museum, to celebrate cutting-edge work at the interface between the arts and sciences. In 2019, Timothy Sandefur's biographyThe Ascent of Jacob Bronowski: The Life and Ideas of a Popular Science Icon,[21] he describes Bronowski as more than a polymath, and that he "was involved with nearly every major intellectual undertaking of the twentieth century"; that he was a "serious philosopher" who made "probably the finest documentary film ever made".[11]
4430289.pdf in order to open it in a pdf reader.{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
