Derek John de Solla Price (22 January 1922 – 3 September 1983) was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist. He was known for his investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of scientometrics". Biography Price was born in Leyton, England, to Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. He began work in 1938 as an assistant in a physics laboratory at the South West Essex Technical College, before studying Physics and Mathematics at the University of London, where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1942. He then worked as an assistant to Harry Lowery carrying out research on hot and molten metals, and working towards a London external Ph.D. in experimental physics which he obtained in 1946. This work led to several research papers and to a patent for an emissive-correcting optical pyrometer. He then went to the USA on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, working in Pittsburgh and Princeton, returning to England in 1947. He was married that year to Ellen Hjorth in Copenhagen. In 1948 Price took a 3-year position as a teacher of applied mathematics at Raffles College, Singapore, which was to become part of the National University of Singapore. There he met C. Northcote Parkinson, the naval historian, who stimulated a love of history in Price that would change the direction of his career. While in Singapore, he formulated his theory on the exponential growth of science. He was looking after the university's complete run of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, while Raffles College had its library built. He started reading these, and as he placed the volumes in chronological order he noticed that their yearly height increased exponentially with time. This led to a presentation at the Sixth International Congress of the History of Science in Amsterdam, in 1950. Returning to England, Price decided to make a career in the history of science, and enrolled for a second Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, supported by an ICI fellowship. He had initially intended to work on a survey of scientific instruments, but during his studies he discovered The Equatorie of the Planetis, a Peterhouse manuscript in Cambridge University Library. The manuscript, written in Middle English, describes an Equatorium, an astronomical calculating instrument, and became the basis of the