BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Physics Linda French has been named a winner of the 2010 Herbert C. Pollock Award for her efforts to bring attention to the extraordinary life and work of 18th-century deaf astronomer John Goodricke.
The Herbert C. Pollock Award, bestowed by the Dudley Observatory in New York, provides encouragement and support for an innovative project in the history of astronomy or astrophysics. French won the award with her paper titled, “Hearing with the Eye: The Astronomical Education of John Goodricke.”
French, who has been a member of the Illinois Wesleyan faculty since 2002, is known for her work in astronomy, and is often invited to the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory near La Serena, Chile, to study asteroids. She became intrigued by the amateur astronomer Goodricke, who died in 1784 at the age of 22 of pneumonia.
“I’ve always been curious about him,” said French. “How did he live? How did he get interested in astronomy? How did he do his observations?” According to French, Goodricke and his neighbor Edward Pigott discovered and measured the period of variation of stars by observing in the skies above their homes in York, England. “These stars are terribly important in modern astronomy,” said French.