Dava Sobel (born June 15, 1947) is an American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. Her books include Longitude, about English clockmaker John Harrison; Galileo's Daughter, about Galileo's daughter Maria Celeste; and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars about the Harvard Computers.

Biography

Sobel was born in The Bronx, New York City. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Binghamton University. She wrote Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time in 1995. The story was made into a television movie, of the same name by Charles Sturridge and Granada Film in 1999, and was shown in the United States by A&E. Her book Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002. Sobel made her first foray into teaching at the University of Chicago as the Vare Writer-in-Residence in the winter of 2006. She taught a one-quarter seminar on writing about science. She served as a judge for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012. Sobel is the niece of journalist Ruth Gruber and the cousin of epidemiologist David Michaels.

Legacy

Asteroid 30935 Davasobel, discovered by Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy was named after her for her literary work in physics. Sobel states she is a chaser of solar eclipses and that "it's the closest thing to witnessing a miracle". As of August 2012 she had seen eight, and planned to see the November 2012 total solar eclipse in Australia.

Publications

Recognition

She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022 "for outstanding writings covering many centuries of key developments in physics and astronomy and the people central to those developments".