The Madras College Archive

     


Former Pupil Biographies

Eric Gray Forbes BSc, MSc, PhD, MLitt (1933 - 1984)

 
Eric Forbes was born in St Andrews and attended Madras College. He went to St Andrews University and graduated with a BSc in 1954, one year ahead of schedule. He next went to Arcetri and Gottingen doing astrophysical research

He continued postgraduate study at St Andrews University and gained a PhD in Astronomy in 1961.

He took a post as lecturer in physics and mathematics at St Mary's Teacher Training College in Twickenham between 1961 and 1965 and then moved to Edinburgh University. He was appointed as  Reader in 1973 and Professor of History and Science in 1978. He initiated the publication of Scotland's contributions to the history of scientific knowledge in the early 1980s. He was chairman of the History Department of Edinburgh University from 1982 to 1984 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1984.
 

Publications by Eric Gray include:

The development of navigational aids in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(MSc dissertation 1965)
The Euler-Mayer Correspondence (1971)
Tobias Meyer's Opera Inedita (1971)
The Unpublished Writings of Tobias Meyer (3 volumes, 1972)
The Birth of Navigational Science (1974)
Greenwich Observatory, Volume 1: Origins and Early History 1675-1835 (1975)
The Gresham Lectures of John Flamsteed (1975)
Tobias Meyer (Biography, 1980)

 

He was Secretary (1977) and then Vice President (1981) of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. He died after heart surgery aged 51 in 1984.