Derek John de Solla Price (22 January 1922 – 3 September 1983) was a British
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
,
historian of science
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal.
Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopo ...
, and
information scientist
The term information scientist developed in the latter part of the twentieth century to describe an individual, usually with a relevant subject degree (such as one in Information and Computer Science - CIS) or high level of subject knowledge, prov ...
. He was known for his investigation of the
Antikythera mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism ( ) is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-yea ...
, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of
scientometrics".
Biography
Price was born in
Leyton
Leyton () is a town in east London, England, within the London Borough of Waltham Forest. It borders Walthamstow to the north, Leytonstone to the east, and Stratford to the south, with Clapton, Hackney Wick and Homerton, across the River L ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
, to Philip Price, a
tailor
A tailor is a person who makes or alters clothing, particularly in men's clothing. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term to the thirteenth century.
History
Although clothing construction goes back to prehistory, there is evidence of ...
, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. He began work in 1938 as an assistant in a physics laboratory at the
South West Essex Technical College, before studying
Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
and
Mathematics at the
University of London
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...
, where he received a
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...
in 1942. He then worked as an assistant to Harry Lowery carrying out research on hot and molten metals, and working towards a
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
external
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in
experimental physics which he obtained in 1946. This work led to several research papers and to a patent for an emissive-correcting optical pyrometer. He then went to the USA on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, working in Pittsburgh and Princeton, returning to England in 1947. He was married that year to Ellen Hjorth in Copenhagen.
In 1948 Price took a 3-year position as a teacher of applied mathematics at Raffles College, Singapore, which was to become part of the
National University of Singapore. There he met
C. Northcote Parkinson
Cyril Northcote Parkinson (30 July 1909 – 9 March 1993) was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller ''Parkinson's Law'' (1957), in which Parkinson advanced Parkinson's law, stating t ...
, the naval historian, who stimulated a love of history in Price that would change the direction of his career.
While in Singapore, he formulated his theory on the exponential growth of science. He was looking after the university's complete run of the ''
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'' is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society. In its earliest days, it was a private venture of the Royal Society's secretary. It was established in 1665, making it the first journa ...
'', while Raffles College had its library built. He started reading these, and as he placed the volumes in chronological order he noticed that their yearly height increased exponentially with time. This led to a presentation at the Sixth International Congress of the History of Science in Amsterdam, in 1950.
[
Returning to England, Price decided to make a career in the history of science, and enrolled for a second Ph.D. at the ]University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...
, supported by an ICI fellowship.[ He had initially intended to work on a survey of scientific instruments, but during his studies he discovered '' The Equatorie of the Planetis'', a ]Peterhouse
Peterhouse is the oldest constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England, founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely. Today, Peterhouse has 254 undergraduates, 116 full-time graduate students and 54 fellows. It is quite o ...
manuscript in Cambridge University Library
Cambridge University Library is the main research library of the University of Cambridge. It is the largest of the over 100 libraries within the university. The Library is a major scholarly resource for the members of the University of Cambri ...
. The manuscript, written in Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...
, describes an Equatorium
An equatorium (plural, equatoria) is an astronomical calculating instrument. It can be used for finding the positions of the Moon, Sun, and planets without arithmetic operations, using a geometrical model to represent the position of a given c ...
, an astronomical calculating instrument, and became the basis of the thesis for his PhD, which he obtained in 1954, and also for a book, published the following year.[ He believed the work to be by Geoffrey Chaucer, who had written '']A Treatise on the Astrolabe
''A Treatise on the Astrolabe'' is a medieval instruction manual on the astrolabe by Geoffrey Chaucer. It describes both the form and the proper use of the instrument, and stands out as a prose technical work from a writer better known for poet ...
'', but it is now attributed to a St Albans monk called John Westwyk.
Price received a Nuffield Foundation award for research in the History of science, which enabled him to work on scientific instruments during 1955–1956. He first prepared a catalogue of the instrument collection of the British Museum, and then a catalogue of all the ancient astrolabes that he was able to locate.
While working on his Ph.D. in Cambridge, Price met Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese science. As a result of his work on the Equatorium Price was invited to participate in a project on medieval Chinese astronomical clocks. This led to the book ''Heavenly Clockwork'' by Needham, Wang Ling and Price, which was published in 1960.[
]
Another interest in ancient technology concerned the Antikythera mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism ( ) is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-yea ...
. This machine had been retrieved from a wreck off the island of Antikythera
Antikythera or Anticythera ( ) is a Greek island lying on the edge of the Aegean Sea, between Crete and Peloponnese. In antiquity the island was known as (). Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality of Kythira isl ...
in 1900, and its function had remained unknown. Price started working on this in the 1950s, and continued on and off for twenty years using various techniques including gamma radiography. He published two papers on the mechanism, in 1959 and 1974, showing that it was a planetary computer, dating from about 80 BCE.[ Also, with Joseph Noble, he studied the machinery of the ]Tower of the Winds
The Tower of the Winds or the Horologion of Andronikos Kyrrhestes is an octagonal Pentelic marble clocktower in the Roman Agora in Athens that functioned as a ''horologion'' or "timepiece". It is considered the world's first meteorological stat ...
in Athens
Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
, and showed it to be water-driven clockwork, showing times and seasons.[
Around 1950, Price adopted his mother's Sephardic name, "de Solla", as a middle name.][ He was a "British Atheist ... from a rather well-known Sephardic Jewish family", and although his ]Danish
Danish may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark
People
* A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark
* Culture of Denmark
* Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
wife, Ellen, had been christened as a Lutheran
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Cathol ...
, he did not, according to their son Mark
Mark may refer to:
Currency
* Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina
* East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic
* Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927
* F ...
, regard their marriage as "mixed", because they were both atheists.
After obtaining his second doctorate, Price found advancement difficult in England. One colleague alleged that Price, who came from a lower-class background, was "not socially house-trained," and he suspected that he was turned down for university positions for personal reasons. Price decided to move to the United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
. In 1957 he became a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
, and then a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...
in Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...
. At Princeton he studied ancient astronomy with Otto Neugebauer
Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in anti ...
. In 1959 he joined the Department of History at Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
initially as a one-year visitor. He would remain at Yale for the rest of his life.[
Price gave a series of lectures in Yale in 1959, which formed the basis for a book, ''Science since Babylon'' (1961).][ In 1960, a Department of History of Science and Medicine was formed at Yale, largely through the efforts of John Fulton who had been Professor of the History of Medicine since 1951. Price became Professor of the History of Science, and on Fulton's death in 1960 became chairman of the department. In 1962 he became the Avalon Professor of the History of Science.][
The quantitative study of science, Scientometrics, and its application to science policy, became the principal focus of Price's work from the 1960s onwards. In 1963 his best-known book ''Little Science, Big Science'' was published.][ Early in that year, he met ]Eugene Garfield
Eugene Eli Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017) was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create ''Current Contents'', ''Science Citation Index'' (SCI), ''Journ ...
, founder of the Science Citation Index
The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...
(SCI), and formed a lasting collaboration. SCI would provide most of the data for his quantitative work, allowing studies not just of the quantity of scientific publication, but, for example, of the impact of those publications, and of the duration of that impact.[ In 1965, Price gave the first Science of Science Foundation lecture, entitled ''The Scientific Foundations of Science Policy'', given at the Royal Institution in ]London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
. He argued that as science grew exponentially it presented new challenges to policy-makers, and that they could be helped by the kind of Scientometric work he was carrying out and promoting. Clearly exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, and the slowing of growth rates will correspond to pressing issues around allocation of resources. He also emphasised the critical importance of communication, referring to the "invisible college
Invisible College is the term used for a small community of interacting scholars who often met face-to-face, exchanged ideas and encouraged each other. One group that has been described as a precursor group to the Royal Society of London consis ...
", a network of scientific communication that exists outside formal channels. The lecture was reviewed at length in the journal Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
.
Price died of a heart attack at the home of his oldest friend, Anthony Michaelis, in London, during a visit to attend the wedding of his niece. He was survived by his wife, Ellen, and their three children, Linda, Jeffrey, and Mark.[
In 1984, Price received, posthumously, the ASIS Research Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information science.
Since 1984, the Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal is awarded by the ]International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics was founded in 1993 in Berlin at the International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics. It is an association for professionals in the field of scientometrics.
T ...
to scientists with outstanding contributions to the fields of quantitative studies of science.
Scientific contributions
Price's major scientific contributions include:
* Price's square root law or Price's law,[ ] on the topic of authors publishing academic literature, proposed that half of the publications come from the square root of all authors. For example, if 100 papers are written by 25 authors, then out of the 25 authors will have contributed 50 papers. However, empirical data suggests that Price's law is a poor fit, while the related Lotka's law
Lotka's law, named after Alfred J. Lotka, is one of a variety of special applications of Zipf's law. It describes the frequency of publication by authors in any given field. It states that the number of authors making x contributions in a giv ...
[ is a good fit;
* Studies of the exponential growth of science and the half-life of scientific literature;
* Quantitative studies of the network of citations between scientific papers (Price 1965), including the discovery that both the in- and out-degrees of a citation network have power-law distributions, making this the first published example of a ]scale-free network
A scale-free network is a network whose degree distribution follows a power law, at least asymptotically. That is, the fraction ''P''(''k'') of nodes in the network having ''k'' connections to other nodes goes for large values of ''k'' as
:
P(k) ...
;
* Price's model Price's model (named after the physicist Derek J. de Solla Price) is a mathematical model for the growth of citation networks. It was the first model which generalized the Simon model to be used for networks, especially for growing networks. Price's ...
, a mathematical theory of the growth of citation networks, based on what would now be called a preferential attachment
A preferential attachment process is any of a class of processes in which some quantity, typically some form of wealth or credit, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects according to how much they already have, so that those who ...
process (Price 1976). This is closely related to the Matthew effect;
* An analysis of the Antikythera mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism ( ) is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the oldest example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-yea ...
, an ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
analogue computer
An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuous variation aspect of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities (''analog signals'') to model the problem being solved. In ...
and astronomical
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxi ...
instrument (Price 1959, 1974).
* A full bibliography is provided by Yagi et al. (1986)[
]
Selected publications
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*
* Reprinted 2019 by Good Press .
*
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* See review .
*
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* see review
*
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*
* (Winner of 1976 JASIS paper award.)
*
* Second edition 1986; with supplement 2008: .
*
*
See also
*Equatorium
An equatorium (plural, equatoria) is an astronomical calculating instrument. It can be used for finding the positions of the Moon, Sun, and planets without arithmetic operations, using a geometrical model to represent the position of a given c ...
*''A Treatise on the Astrolabe
''A Treatise on the Astrolabe'' is a medieval instruction manual on the astrolabe by Geoffrey Chaucer. It describes both the form and the proper use of the instrument, and stands out as a prose technical work from a writer better known for poet ...
''
Notes
References
External links
*
Derek de Solla Price (1983)
This Week's Citation Classic: Little Science, Big Science
'' ISI. Current Contents'' 29:18 (July 1983).
Derek John de Solla Price Medal of the journal ''Scientometrics''
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics
{{DEFAULTSORT:Price, Derek J. De Solla
1922 births
1983 deaths
Alumni of University of London Worldwide
Information scientists
People from Leyton
English atheists
English Jews
Bibliometricians
Historians of science
Jewish atheists
Jewish historians
Yale University faculty
20th-century English historians
English people of Spanish-Jewish descent
Leonardo da Vinci Medal recipients
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences