Clarisse Doris Hellman (1910–1973)

Clarisse Doris Hellman was born in New York City to a family with a special appreciation for the sciences. Her father Alfred M. Hellman was a physician and obstetrician. She attended the Horace Mann School and then Vassar College, where she studied mathematics and astronomy, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with honors in 1930. She then went to Radcliffe College as a Vassar College Fellow and received one of the country's first graduate degrees in the history of science. After returning to New York, she later earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1943. In 1933, she married Morton Pepper, a prominent attorney with whom she had two daughters. In 1951, she joined the faculty of the Pratt Institute, where she taught until 1966. She taught briefly as an adjunct professor of history of science at New York University, before accepting an appointment at Queens College of the City University of New York, where she also taught at the graduate school until 1973. Her doctoral thesis at Columbia, The Comet of 1577: Its Place in the History of Astronomy, was published in 1944. She became one of the first professional historians of science in the USA, and was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She devoted much of her life to the study of Johannes Kepler and to the history of exact science in the Renaissance. As a scholar and writer, she was expert at working in German and other foreign languages, and her most lasting contribution is her translation of Max Caspar’s monumental biography Johannes Kepler (1959).