People
Erwin N. Hiebert
Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus
Erwin Nick Hiebert, 93, of Belmont, Massachusetts, passed away peacefully on November 28, 2012, in Waltham, Massachusetts. He was a prominent historian of science who was on the faculty at numerous universities in the U.S. and abroad; he taught most recently at Harvard University from 1970 to 1989 and was Professor Emeritus there from 1989 to 2012. Prof. Hiebert was an active and prolific scholar and teacher to scores of students who became well-known academics in the field. He was also a devoted husband, father, and grandfather.
Erwin Hiebert was born on May 27, 1919 in Waldheim, Saskatchewan. He was the third
of seven children of Tina Harms and Cornelius N. Hiebert, a renowned Mennonite Brethren minister, and spent most of his childhood in an urban Russian Mennonite community in multi-ethnic Winnipeg, Manitoba. Hiebert had an early curiosity and passion for science (chemistry and physics); he attended Faraday Grade School and graduated from Sir Isaac Newton High School in Winnipeg. But he also spent memorable summers as a youth working long hours on Mennonite farms harvesting wheat in Oklahoma (home of his mother’s side of the family), Kansas, and Nebraska and moving north up to the Dakotas as the harvest progressed. In this way he earned enough money to put himself through college.
Hiebert attended Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas for two years and then transferred to nearby Bethel College, where he received his B.A. degree in 1941, majoring in Chemistry and Mathematics. In 1943 he received his M.A. in Chemistry and Physics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. While in Hillsboro, he met Elfrieda Franz; the two were married in 1943. They moved immediately to Whiting, Indiana, where he accepted a job as a Research Chemist at Standard Oil Company of Indiana under the jurisdiction of the Chicago Metallurgical Labs of the Manhattan Project and was employed there until 1946. From 1946 to 1947, Hiebert served as Assistant to the Chief of the Scientific Branch, War Department General Staff in Washington, DC. In 1947, he and Elfrieda settled in Chicago, where he became a Research Chemist at the Institute for the Study of Metals at the University of Chicago until 1950, earning a M.Sc. degree there in Physical Chemistry in 1949. Their first child, Catherine Anne, was born in 1948 in Chicago. In 1950, they relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, where Hiebert received his Ph.D. in 1954, with a double major in History of Science and Physical Chemistry.
Prof. Hiebert enjoyed a long, illustrious academic and research career. His first teaching post, from 1952 to 1954, was an Assistant Professorship of Chemistry at San Francisco State College. Margaret Helen, the Hieberts’ second child, was born there in 1954. He subsequently became a Fulbright Lecturer (1954-55) at the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Göttingen, Germany, where Thomas Nels, their third child, was born (1955). The following year, Prof. Hiebert became an Instructor in the History of Science at Harvard University, a position he held from 1955 to 1957. From 1957 to 1970, he taught in the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, serving as Chairman from 1960 to 1965. Prof. Hiebert joined the faculty of the Department of History of Science at Harvard University in 1970, whereupon the family moved permanently to the Boston area, settling in Belmont. He was Chairman of the department from 1977 to 1984, and was Professor Emeritus at Harvard from 1989 until his death in 2012.
During his tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Prof. Hiebert served as scientist on a UW geophysical expedition in the Canadian Arctic (1959) and consultant for the University of Kabul at the International Education Exchange Program (1961). He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey in 1961-62 and 1968-69 and Visiting Professor at the University of Tübingen, Germany in 1965 as well
as at Harvard (1965).
Once permanently at Harvard in 1970, Prof. Hiebert also served as Visiting Lecturer (1978-79) at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung der Universität Bielefeld in Germany as well as at Hebrew University and the Van Leer Foundation in Jerusalem (1973, 1981). He was a Visiting Research Scholar at Churchill College, Cambridge University in 1980, 1981, and 1982 and a Fellow in Residence there during 1984-85.
At the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Association for Science and Technology
in Beijing, Prof. Hiebert was Visiting Lecturer in 1985 and visiting Hill Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota in 1987. In 1987-88,
he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and Lecturer at the Humboldt Universität in East Berlin in 1988.
After assuming his Emeritus post at Harvard, Prof. Hiebert was Visiting Professor at the Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Göttingen in 1991-92 and Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin in 1998, 2002, and 2007. Despite his Emeritus status, he continued throughout these years to devote most of his time to his own research and writing, journeying from Belmont to Harvard nearly every day for many years after his retirement to work in his much-loved study in Widener Library.
Prof. Hiebert headed a variety of regional, national, and international History of Science organizations. In 1967-68, he was elected President of the Midwest History of Science Society; in 1971-72, he was Vice President and then President in 1973-74 of the national History of Science Society. He was a member of the Academie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences starting in 1971 and Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975. In 1981, Prof. Hiebert became Chairman-elect of the History and Philosophy of Science Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and in 1982, Chairman, serving until 1986. He was also President of the Division of the History of Science of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS-DHS) from 1982 to 1985. Prof. Hiebert was a Member of the Advisory Committee of the 18-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1970-90) and served on editorial boards of numerous other major publications and journals. He presented papers at countless conferences and invited lectures over his many years as an active historian of science.
Prof. Hiebert was the author of three books (The Impact of Atomic Energy, 1961; Historical Roots of the Principle of Conservation of Energy, 1962; and The Conception of Thermodynamics in the Scientific Thought of Mach and Planck, 1968) and numerous articles. His research and teaching focused on the 19th- and 20th-century history and philosophy of science, in particular, atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics and chemistry, energy and thermodynamics, physical chemistry and chemical physics, electrochemistry, the structure of matter, low temperature physics, science and Marxist thought, the interactions of Western science and religion, scientists as philosophers of science, and musical acoustics. At his death he was completing a publication on the implications of the science of acoustics for music composition and instrument construction.
Prof. Hiebert was perhaps best known for his teaching, evident in the generations of students (altogether 37) who worked with him on their doctoral degrees and who have populated academies throughout North America and Europe. They benefitted from the thoughtful and thorough guidance and encouragement that he provided them and were all also frequent guests in Erwin and Elfrieda Hieberts’ warm and hospitable home, typically keeping in touch with “E and E” throughout their careers and beyond. He was known for the intellectual zeal with which he engaged students in his seminars and notably never taught the same course the same way twice; he was perpetually looking for ways to bring new understandings to topics of research and study. One of his strongest convictions was that in order to study the history of science, it was essential to have basic grounding in the science itself. Prof. Hiebert was the recipient of two Festschrifts: Historia Mathematica: Papers in Honor of Erwin N. Hiebert, ed. Joseph Dauben (1980), and The Invention of Physical Science, ed. Mary Jo Nye, Joan Richards, and Roger Stuewer (1992).
Hiebert joined the Mennonite Congregation of Boston in 1970, when the family moved to the area, and participated actively in it until his death. As a pair, the Hieberts were long-time members of its progressive Social Concerns Committee.
He played the clarinet for most of his long life and is affectionately remembered for his spirited participation in informal evenings of music-making with the family.
Prof. Hiebert was preceded in death in September 2012 by his wife of 69 years, Elfrieda Franz Hiebert, and is survived by his three children: Catherine Hiebert Kerst of Silver Spring, Maryland; Margaret Hiebert Beissinger and husband Mark Beissinger of Princeton, New Jersey; and Thomas Nels Hiebert and wife Lenore Voth Hiebert of Fresno, California. He also leaves seven grandchildren: David and Anitha Kerst; Jonathan and Rebecca Beissinger; and Sarah, Benjamin, and Daniel Hiebert.
Prof. Hiebert was keenly dedicated to scholarship for virtually his entire life. From his early years in the classroom in Winnipeg to the last year of his life, he was passionate about exploring the world of science and interpreting how earlier scientists and philosophers had also explored it. He will be remembered as a devoted researcher and teacher but above all as a committed, caring, and beloved husband, father, and grandfather.
A memorial service for Erwin Hiebert will be held at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Sunday, February 17 at 2:00 p.m.
Contributions can be made in Erwin and Elfrieda Hieberts’ memory to the Mennonite Central Committee Global Family Program Supporting Education, 21 S. 12th St., P.O. Box 500, Akron, PA 17501 or at https://donate.mcc.org/registry/Elfrieda-and-Erwin-Hiebert
