Mary Jo Nye (born December 5, 1944) is an American historian of science and Horning Professor in the Humanities emerita of the History Department at Oregon State University.[1][2] She is known for her work on the relationships between scientific discovery and social and political phenomena.
Nye was born December 5, 1944, to Joe Allen and Mildred Mann of Nashville, Tennessee. She began her undergraduate studies as a chemistry major at Vanderbilt University, but became interested in history of science after taking a class from Robert Siegfried.[3] In 1964 she left Vanderbilt to attend the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, where she completed her BA in Chemistry in 1965.[4]
She married Robert A. Nye, also a historian, on February 17, 1968. They traveled to France to do doctoral research in 1968: their trip coincided with revolutionary unrest and offered them opportunities to learn French cooking. Mary Jo Nye completed a Ph.D. in history of science at the University of Wisconsin in 1970, advised by Erwin N. Hiebert, whom Nye credits for his egalitarian support of women students. At the time, students studying the 19th and 20th century were also a minority in the field. Nye's generation of scholars is credited with creating a shift that embraces international perspectives and examines the interactions of politics and science.[3]
Nye was awarded a National Science Foundation post-doc in the history of science in 1969.[3][4] In 1970 she began teaching part-time at the University of Oklahoma, later moving to a tenure-track position. She was appointed Assistant Professor in 1975, Associate Professor in 1978, served as Acting Chair of the History of Science department in 1981, and became a Full Professor in 1985.[4] In 1991 she was named George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the History of Science. She and her husband, also a faculty member, shared responsibility for caring for their daughter and frequently traveled to France for research. Their interests later broadened to include England and Germany, as Nye studied the British physicist and Nobel laureate P.M.S. Blackett.[3] In 1993, Nye was appointed chair of the History of Science Department at the University of Oklahoma.[4]
In 1994, Nye and her husband were co-appointed as Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professors of the Humanities and Professors of History at Oregon State University.[5] AT OSU she became interested in Linus Pauling, whose papers are held by the university, and whose career covers much of the 20th century.[3] She worked as well on Hungarian-born physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi[6] Nye retired from Oregon State University in 2009.[4][7]
Mary Jo's work has brilliantly illuminated important areas of the history of modern European and American physics and chemistry ... Her elegant writing is always a joy to read, her research as deep as it is broad and her historical arguments are judicious and convincing.
Molecular reality; A perspective on the scientific work of Jean Perrin, London: MacDonald, 1972
Science in the Provinces: Scientific Communities and Provincial Leadership in France, 1860-1930, University of California Press, 1986, ISBN0-520-05561-6
From chemical philosophy to theoretical chemistry : dynamics of matter and dynamics of disciplines, 1800 - 1950, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993
Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940, Harvard University Press, Reprint 1999, ISBN0-674-06382-1
Was Linus Pauling a Revolutionary Chemist? (Award Address - Dexter Award) in: Bull. Hist. Chem. 25 (2000), 73-82.
The invention of physical science : intersections of mathematics, theology and natural philosophy since the seventeenth century; essays in honor of Erwin N. Hiebert, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992
The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN0-521-57199-5
Mary Jo Nye, “Video: Session Chair, "Scientists and Textbooks”, Oregon State University
