Marie Boas Hall
American historian of science (1919 – 2009)
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Through World War II
Early life and education
Boas was born Marie Boas in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 18, 1919. Her parents, Ralph Boas and Louise Schulz, were English teachers at Wheaton college in Norton. Her older brother was mathematician Ralph P. Boas Jr. and her uncle was historian of ideas George Boas.
She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1940. During World War II, she worked in the MIT Radiation Laboratory with Henry Guerlac in writing the history of the laboratory and of the operational use of radar during the war. She continued her work with Guerlac at Cornell University and received her PhD in 1949. Her thesis covered the mechanical philosophy of Robert Boyle and was published in the history of science journal Osiris in 1952.
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Career
After receiving her doctorate from Cornell University, she took a teaching position at the University of Massachusetts and subsequently moved to Brandeis University.
Marie Boas went to England from the US, "to work on Robert Boyle's papers, and met Hall, who was working on Isaac Newton's. In 1957 she returned to the University of California, Los Angeles; and in 1959 Hall, whose first marriage had ended in divorce, joined her there and they were married. Two years later they went to Indiana University. In 1963 they were invited back to London, to Imperial College, where Hall became the first professor of the history of science and she senior lecturer. There they trained many graduate students."
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. She won the George Sarton Medal, the most prestigious award of the History of Science Society, together with her husband Alfred Rupert Hall in 1981.