A. Mark Smith

Curators' Professor
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison
area: Medieval history, History of science
office: 216 Read Hall
phone: 573-882-9456
email: smitham@missouri.edu

B.A. St. John's College, Maryland, 1967
M.A. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1972
Ph.D. (joint in History and History of Science), 1976, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Professor Smith teaches a variety of courses in medieval history as well as the history of science from antiquity to the late Enlightenment. Broadly speaking, his interests lie in the field of intellectual history from the pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, his scholarly focus being on the evolution of pre-Newtonian theories of visual perception.

He has published articles in The American Historical Review, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, and Isis. He has twice been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1979 and 1986) and has been awarded not only an individual research grant (1986) and a project-grant (1989) from the National Endowment for the Humanities but also two project-grants from the National Science Foundation (1999 and 2001).

He has just finished a critical edition of the first three books of the seven-book medieval Latin version of Ibn al-Haytham's Kitab al-Manazir and is currently at work on the next three books.

Selected Publications

Descartes's Theory of Light and Refraction. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987.

Ptolemy's Theory of VisualPerception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996.

Ptolemy and the Foundations of Ancient Mathematical Optics: A Source-Based Guided Study. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999.

Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001.

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Professor Smith
drawn by his eldest son

book jacket
Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception
Volumes 1 and 2