Richard S. Westfall

He taught as Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, served as a president of the History of Science Society, and won the 1985 George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement in the history of science after winning the 1982 Leo Gershoy Award and 1983 Pfizer Award for Never at Rest.

Born in Fort Collins, Colorado on April 22, 1924, Westfall graduated from high school in 1942 and enrolled at Yale University to study engineering.

[1] His time at Yale was interrupted by two years of US Navy service in World War II 1944-1946,[2] but he returned to complete his B.A.

(1949) and Ph.D. (1955) degrees in history from Yale, with a dissertation entitled Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England completed under Franklin Baumer.

Late in life he constructed a database of information on the lives and careers of more than 600 scientists of the early modern era, his Catalog of the Scientific Community in the 16th and 17th Centuries, which he made available to other researchers.