Marie Boas Hall

Marie Boas Hall (October 18, 1919 – February 23, 2009) was a historian of science and is considered one of the postwar period pioneers of the study of the Scientific Revolution during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Marie Boas was born in Springfield, Massachusetts.

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.

She then took a teaching position at the University of Massachusetts before subsequently moving to Brandeis University.

She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955.

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 won the George Sarton Medal, the most prestigious award of the History of Science Society, together with her husband Alfred Rupert Hall in 1981.

Her older brother was mathematician Ralph P. Boas, Jr.