10 Facts About Dava Sobel

Dava Sobel was born on June 15,1947 and is an American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics.

Dava Sobel's books include Longitude, about English clockmaker John Harrison; Galileo's Daughter, about Galileo's daughter Maria Celeste; and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars about the Harvard Computers.

Dava Sobel graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Binghamton University.

Dava Sobel wrote Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time in 1995.

Dava Sobel's book Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Dava Sobel holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002.

Dava Sobel taught a one-quarter seminar on writing about science.

Dava Sobel is the niece of journalist Ruth Gruber and the cousin of epidemiologist David Michaels.

Dava Sobel states she is a chaser of solar eclipses and that "it's the closest thing to witnessing a miracle".

Dava Sobel was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022 "for outstanding writings covering many centuries of key developments in physics and astronomy and the people central to those developments".