He taught at Harvard University for 60 years, 1942–2002, becoming the first chair of its Department of the History of Science when it was established in 1966, and he mentored notable students including George Basalla, Lorraine Daston, and Allen G. Debus.
He made a full English translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica and was the second chief editor of the history of science journal Isis.
[2][3] His father died just before Cohen's bar mitzvah at age 12, and Cohen became unmotivated and spent the next years performing unremarkably in schools and early jobs; he attended Columbia Grammar School through 1929 and then spent one semester at New York University before transferring to Farmingdale Agricultural Institute on Long Island for veterinary medicine.
[3][4] This also did not work out, so he returned to New York University but then dropped out and became a Prohibition rum runner while living with relatives in Connecticut.
[4] After nearly being shot while unloading rum, he enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy and began to take his studies more seriously, graduating at the top of his class in 1933.
[4] Cohen next attended Harvard University, where he intended to become a theoretical or mathematical chemical physicist and became a protege of George D.
[4] He graduated in 1937 with a BSc in mathematics and honors in history, with an undergraduate thesis "The Billiard Ball Problem and the Recurrence Property of Dynamical Systems" advised by Birkhoff.
He is also the only one whom I could train completely, and his preparation for work in my field is as good as could be from every point of view, scientific, philosophic, historical, and linguistic.
[3] Cohen succeeded George Sarton as editor of Isis[13] (1952–1958) and, later, served as president of the History of Science Society (1961–1962).
[11][28] For a time in the 1940s, Cohen said he was "in charge of all elementary laboratory work at Harvard — civilians, army ASTP, and Navy V-12—1600 students at the peak.
[30] Cohen's early teaching work developed the undergraduate General Education program at Harvard.
[32] Cohen supervised the doctoral dissertations of Lorraine Daston, Allen G. Debus,[33] Judith Grabiner, Kenneth Manning, Uta Merzbach, Duane H. D. Roller, Joan L. Richards, and Helen L.
[37] In March 1984, Scientific American published an essay by Cohen on Florence Nightingale and her contributions to social statistics.
[25] This interest then developed under the mentorship of Alexandre Koyré, who Cohen met via Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian and philosopher Giorgio de Santillana.
[32] After Koyré's death, Cohen sought assistance from Harvard (BA 1959) Latinist Anne Whitman on the project.
The work was finally published in 1999, thirty years after it had begun, after review by Richard S. Westfall, Curtis Wilson, and Smith.
Reviewers particularly valued Cohen's argument that scientific principles were used more as rhetorical metaphors and analogies rather than as genuine mechanical inspirations,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55] the general interest of many rich anecdotes of 18th century intellectual history[49][52][54] such as Benjamin Franklin's invention of Polly Baker,[54] and Cohen's attention to debunking Woodrow Wilson's then-popular characterization of the Constitution of the United States as a "Newtonian document" (in his 1908 Constitutional Government in the United States),[48][49][50][51][52][53] though historian of evolution John C. Greene alleged a core error in Cohen's argument against Wilson's invocation of Darwinism.