C41/ICHA — a brief history

Commission 41 was created at the VIIth IAU General Assembly in Zürich in 1948. The ICHA, a joint Commission of the IAU and the IUHPS/DHST, was founded in 2001 in order to include scholars who, being primarily historians rather than astronomers, are not members of the IAU.

As is evident from its first report, published in IAU Transactions 8 (1954), 623, C41 had an inauspicious start. Otto Neugebauer was appointed the first President in his absence, but proceeded to express his conviction that “an international organization in the history of astronomy has no positive function…my only activity during my term of service consisted in iterated attempts to resign”. It was Herbert Dingle who acted as President for the 1952 GA, and then carried the Commission forward through the next two triennia. The first members of the Commission were Armitage, Birkenmajer, Danjon, Dijksterhuis, Dingle, Dittrich, Hubble, Idelson, Spencer Jones, Kukarin, Kulikovsky, Lundmark, Marguerat, Nordenmark, Norlund, Pannekoek, Pelseneer, Pogo, Sadykov, Seydl, Volta, and Zinner.

Past presidents

The Commission Presidents to date have been:

• 1948–1952 Otto Neugebauer (USA)
• 1952–1955 Herbert Dingle (UK)
• 1955–1958 Herbert Dingle (UK)
• 1958–1961 Piotr G. Kulikovsky (USSR)
• 1961–1964 Piotr G. Kulikovsky (USSR)
• 1964–1967 Eugeniusz Rybka (Poland)
• 1967–1970 Eugeniusz Rybka (Poland)
• 1970–1973 Owen Gingerich (USA)
• 1973–1976 Owen Gingerich (USA)
• 1976–1979 Jerzy Dobrzycki (Poland)
• 1979–1982 Michael Hoskin (UK)
• 1982–1985 Olaf Pederson (Denmark)
• 1985–1988 John Eddy (USA)
• 1988–1991 John D. North (UK)
• 1991–1994 Suzanne Débarbat (France)
• 1994–1997 S.M. Razaullah Ansari (India)
• 1997–2000 Steven J. Dick (USA)
• 2000–2003 F. Richard Stephenson (UK)
• 2003–2006 Alexander Gurshtein (Russia/USA)
• 2006–2009 Nha Il-Seong (Korea)
• 2009–2012 Clive Ruggles (UK)