Clarisse Doris Hellman

RAS obituary


Obituaries Index


The death of Professor C.Doris Hellman on 1973 March 28 in New York, has robbed astronomy of a noted historian. Born in New York in 1910, she was a protégé of George Sarton, the distinguished Harvard historian of science, and was educated at Vassar College, Radcliffe College and Columbia. After her marriage in 1933 to the lawyer Morton Pepper, she felt it proper for the pace of her academic work to slow down, but by 1943 when her younger daughter was over the infant stage, her notable research on the comet of 1577 was ready. This gained her a PhD at Columbia, and her thesis was published by the University Press the next year. In 1951 she returned to academic work in earnest, teaching history of science at the Pratt Institute and, later, at Queen's College, New York, holding a chair at both institutions.

Doris Hellman concentrated mainly on astronomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: she was an authority on Tycho Brahe and drew attention to the contemporary popularity of his hybrid planetary theory, she made available Max Caspar's study of Keplar by translating his detailed biography into English, but, above all, she showed in her study of the 1577 comet how much historians of science can gain of the contemporary scene and of current beliefs from an examination of the less important books and pamphlets that are published at the time of a striking celestial phenomenon.

Professor Hellman was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1960, and with her husband, who supported her work at every turn, was a rare but welcome visitor here. A somewhat unassuming person with great charm, she could become deeply enthusiastic over historical questions, and her death will be felt as a personal loss by all who knew her or worked with her.

C.A.RONAN.

Clarisse Doris Hellman's obituary appeared in Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 15:3 (1974), 358.