Jacob Bronowski Quotes

Jacob Bronowski was born in Łódź, Poland. He was a Polish-born British mathematician, historian of science, poet and biologist. Of Polish-Jewish origin, he is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book. His family moved to Germany during the First World War, and then to Britain in 1920. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. In 1950, he was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes. Work on this turned his interests towards the human biology of humanity's intellectual products. He was an associate director of the Salk Institute from 1964.