Professor Nicholas Jardine FBA

Nicholas Jardine (born 4 September 1943) is a British mathematician, philosopher of science and its history, historian of astronomy and natural history, and amateur mycologist. He is Emeritus Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Cambridge. Jardine was educated at Monkton Combe School in Somerset and read natural sciences at King's College, Cambridge. He then worked as a King's College and Royal Society Research Fellow on the automation of classification and information retrieval and its applications to biological taxonomy and diagnosis. In 1975 he moved to Darwin College, Cambridge and to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Since then he has developed a question-based pragmatic philosophy of science (inspired by the work of Ian Hacking), as well as studying the history of early-modern astronomy and natural history. Currently he is writing a book on the aims and methods of histories of the sciences.