Boris Mikhailovich Hessen (), also Gessen (16 August 1893, Elisavetgrad – 20 December 1936, Moscow), was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He is most famous for his paper on Newton's Principia which became foundational in historiography of science. Biography Boris Hessen was born to a Jewish family in Elisavetgrad, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). He studied physics and natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh (1913—1914) together with his gymnasium school friend Igor Tamm. He then went to study at the St. Petersburg University (1914—1917). He enlisted in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, joined the Communist Party in 1919 and became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council (1919—1921) and worked at the Party School. He also continued his physics studies at various places eventually graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow in 1928. In this year he was criticised by Alexander Maximov, who criticised him for being a "machist" and "right deviationist". After working in the institute for two more years, he became a physics professor and the chair of the physics department at the Moscow State University in 1931. In 1933 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. International Congress of the History of Science In 1931, as part of a Soviet delegation led by N.I. Bukharin, Hessen delivered the paper "The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London. This work became foundational in the history of science and led to modern studies of scientific revolutions and sociology of science. Hessen asserted that Isaac Newton's most famous work was created to cater to the goals and desires of 17th century industry and economy. Hessen asserted that Newton's work was inspired by his economic status and context, that the Principia was the solution of technical problems of the bourgeoisie. At that time in the Soviet Union, the work of Albert Einstein was under attack by Communist Party philosophers; being supposedly motivated by bourgeois values, it was "bourgeois science" , and should henceforth be banned. (In many ways this attack was similar to the Deutsche Physik movement in Germany which occurred only a few years later.) Hessen's paper was a lobbying tactic: Party philosophers would not challenge the accuracy of Newton's theories, and to show them as being motivated by bourgeois concerns