Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science. He found that basic ideas about how nature should be studied were dogmatically accepted in normal science, increasingly questioned, and overthrown during scientific revolutions.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Thomas Kuhn was trained as a physicist but became an educator after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1949. He taught as an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard from 1952 to 1957, as a professor of the history of science at Berkeley (California) from 1958 to 1964, as a professor of the history of science at Princeton from 1964 to 1979, as a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1979 to 1983, and finally, Laurence Rockefeller professor of philosophy at MIT from 1983 to 1991. A member of many professional organizations, he was president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to...