Jacob Bronowski (January 18 1908, Łódź, Poland - August 22 1974, East Hampton, New York, USA) was the presenter of the BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man which inspired Carl Sagan's A Personal Voyage series.

As a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, he co-edited - with William Empson - the literary periodical Experiment which first appeared in 1928.

Bronowski received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry, and was a poet (he lived near to Laura Riding and Robert Graves in Majorca in the 1930s). He spent the war in Operations Research; afterwards he became Director of Research for the National Coal Board (UK). After his experiences as an official observer of the after-effects of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings he turned to biology, as did his friend, Leo Szilard, to better understand the nature of violence. He was an Associate Director of the Salk Institute from 1964.

He is the father of the British academic Lisa Jardine.

Books by Jacob Bronowski

• Bronowski, Jacob. The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. Silliman Memorial Lectures. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Unuversity Press, 1978.
• Bronowski, Jacob. The Poet's Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939; rtp. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979.
• Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Routledge and K. Paul, 1972, ISBN 0710072775 (hardcover), ISBN 0710072783 (pbk.)
• Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Little Brown & Co (T); American ed. edition , 1974, ISBN 0613124634 (the book of the BBC TV series The Ascent of Man)
• Bronowski, Jacob. The Face of Violence. London, Turnstile Press, 1954.
• Bronowski, Jacob. The Common Sense of Science. Harvard University Press; Reprint edition 2004, ISBN 0674146514
• Bronowski, Jacob. Science and Human Values. 1956. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
• Bronowski, Jacob. Insight. Harper & Row; American ed. edition , 1964, ASIN B0007DO1YG (the book of the BBC TV series Insight)
• Bronowski, Jacob. The Identity of Man. Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1965.
• Bronowski, Jacob. Nature and Knowledge: The Philosophy of Contemporary Science.Condon lectures, Oregon State System of Higher Education, 1969.
• Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake: A man without a mask. London: Secker and Warburg, 1943.
• Bronowski, J. and Mazlish, B. The Western Intellectual Tradition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.
• Bronowski, Jacob. A Sense of the Future. Cambridge, Mk MIT Press, 1977.

External links

• The Jacob Bronowski Archive
• Jacob Bronowski: A Retrospective
• The Thought of Jacob Bronowski in his Essays and in the Ascent of Man

British poets | Historians of science | British humanists | British polymaths | Alumni of Jesus College, Cambridge | British Jews | Jewish mathematicians | 1908 births | 1974 deaths

Jacob Bronowski | Jacob Bronowski | Jacob Bronowski | Jacob Bronowski