A Labor of Love: The Renaissance of Astronomy by Noel Swerdlow Has Been Published Posthumously with Help from Friends and Colleagues

Noel Swerdlow, a renowned historian of science, spent nearly a decade at Caltech as a visiting associate following his retirement from the University of Chicago in 2010. The world’s foremost expert on Copernicus—one of the most important contributors to premodern astronomy—Swerdlow passed away in 2021, but his legacy lives on in a new book thanks to Jed Buchwald, the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at Caltech. The Renaissance of Astronomy , published in May, is a comprehensive account by Swerdlow of the works of Regiomontanus, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo