Thomas Leroy Hankins (born September 9, 1933, in Lawrence, Kansas) is an American historian of science.
[1] From 1958 to 1962 he taught high school physics and worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute during the summers.
In later years his teaching focused on early modern science, the Age of Enlightenment and the history of the atomic bomb.
[2] Hankins's work in the 1970s and 1980s particularly concerned with theoretical physics in the 18th and 19th centuries.
He wrote biographies of William Rowan Hamilton and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, and the relationship between science and the Age of Enlightenment.