George Sarton

George Sarton (1884–1956) was the son of a director of the Belgian state railway, whose mother died a few months after giving birth. Sarton studied philosophy, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Ghent. To obtain a doctoral degree in the sciences, the University required a course the history of science, and Sarton enrolled in a course on this subject taught by the mathematician Paul Mansion (Pyenson and Verbruggen, 2009). Sarton went on to defend a thesis in French on the principles of Newton’s mechanics (Sarton, 1911).

While still a doctoral student, Sarton confided to his diary his project “to become the pupil, if I prove worthy, of Henri Poincaré: the most intelligent man of our time.” One concrete step in this direction was a letter he wrote to Poincaré, in which he offered to review a book, ostensibly for the journal Poincaré directed, the Bulletin astronomique. In his his reply to Sarton, Poincaré declined Sarton’s offer, having previously engaged a review of the work in question (§ 6-1-1887).

Sarton married Mabel Elwes in 1911, and in May, 1912, his wife give birth to a daughter, May. It was at about this time that Sarton decided to found Isis, a journal devoted to the history of science. In the first number of Isis, which appeared in March, 1913, Sarton described how the journal came to be. Back in January, 1912, he wrote to Wilhelm Ostwald and Poincaré, and they both “gave such a fine welcome to my projects that I hesitated no longer in proceeding” (Sarton, 1913c). Poincaré’s letter to Sarton tells a somewhat different story, and in fact, Poincaré declined his invitation, probably thinking that Sarton wanted him to join the editorial board of Isis. He agreed, however, to lend Sarton’s editorial project his moral support (§ 6-1-1888).

By mid-March, as Sarton wrote to Henri Lafontaine, he had obtained moral support from Wilhelm Ostwald, William Ramsay and the philosopher and historian of science Gaston Milhaud. Poincaré died before the first issue of Isis appeared, but Sarton included him as a member the patronage committee.

Poincaré was the only dead person on the committee, and the only physicist, which fact prompted Sarton to ask H.-A. Lorentz to take his place:

Ever since the death of the greatly missed Henri Poincaré – thanks to whom the journal exists, as he was the first to support my work – there is not a single physicist left in the patronage committee: this is why I would be very pleased if you would agree to join in.

Lorentz did not join the committee, but this did not break Sarton’s determination to make Isis a respectable scholarly journal. After moving to the United States, Sarton founded the History of Science Society, of which Isis became the official journal in 1924, and which he edited until 1952.

Notes

• 1 May Sarton (1959). George Sarton was more familiar with Poincaré’s contributions to celestial mechanics and astronomy than to mathematics, as he acknowledged in his obituary of Poincaré (Sarton, 1913a, b). He published a brief obituary in the first number of Isis (Sarton, 1913c), where he vigorously denounced Gustave Le Bon’s bastardized edition, in the posthumous collection of Poincaré’s writings entitled Dernières pensées, of the article “L’évolution des lois” (Poincaré, 1912, 1913). Poincaré’s original text was eventually restored in the edition of 1963, which Sarton did not live long enough to see.
• 2 In addition to editing the Bulletin astronomique, and vetting notes in mathematics, physics and mechanics submitted for publication in the Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Poincaré was a member of the editorial board of the engineering journal Éclairage électrique, published under the title Lumière électrique starting in 1908. Poincaré also belonged to the editorial board of the collection Scientia published by Gauthier-Villars. He may have assumed quite naturally that Sarton wanted him to join the editorial board of Isis, while Sarton surely hoped only to add his name to the patronage committee. He ran Isis on his own at first, and did not constitute an editorial board.
• 3 Sarton to Henri Lafontaine, 20 March, 1912, cited by Pyenson and Verbruggen (2009).
• 4 “Depuis le mort du très regretté Henri Poincaré – grâce à qui la revue existe, car il fut le 1^r à soutenir mes efforts – il n’y a plus aucun physicien dans le comité de patronage : c’est pourquoi, je serais très heureux si vous vouliez bien accepter d’en faire partie” George Sarton to H.-A. Lorentz, 2 May, 1913, Lorentz Papers, Noord-Hollands Archief, reproduced in Sources for History of Quantum Physics, AHQP/LTZ-4.