Owen Jay Gingerich (; born 1930) is professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he has written many books on the history of astronomy. Gingerich is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Academy of the History of Science. A committed Christian, he has been active in the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists. He has served on the board of trustees of the Templeton Foundation. Early life Gingerich was born to a Mennonite family in Washington, Iowa, but was raised on the prairies of Kansas where he first became interested in astronomy. His father, Melvin Gingerich, taught at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, from 1941 to 1947, when he took a job at Goshen College in Indiana. He travelled to Poland in 1946 as a seagoing cowboy. When his family relocated, Owen Gingerich began attending Goshen College without having graduated from high school, having just completed his junior year. He continued his studies at Harvard University. In 2004 on May 22, Newton High School awarded him an honorary high school diploma, and he gave a graduation commencement speech to the Newton High School Class of 2004. Career and contributions Gingerich eventually came to teach astronomy at Harvard where his lectures became known for attention-getting schemes. Among them was propelling himself out of the classroom using a fire extinguisher to demonstrate Newton’s third law of motion, and dressing up like a sixteenth-century Latin scholar. He is associated with the Smithsonian through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and also served as chairman of the International Astronomical Union’s Planet Definition Committee, which was charged with updating the astronomical definition of planet to reflect recent discoveries such as Eris. The seven-member committee drafted a definition which preserved Pluto’s status by only requiring a planet to be (1) large enough to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape) and (2) orbiting a star without itself being a star. This proposal was criticized by many for weakening the meaning of the term. The eventual definition adopted by the IAU added an additional requirement, that a body must have cleared its neighborhood of all other sizable objects, language that Gingerich was “not at all pleased” with. In addition to astronomical