17 Facts About Jacob Bronowski

Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher.

Jacob Bronowski is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski won a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

Jacob Bronowski's interests have been described as ranging "widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism".

Jacob Bronowski taught mathematics at University College Hull between 1934 and 1942.

Jacob Bronowski wrote poetry and had a deep affinity for William Blake.

Jacob Bronowski's family moved to Germany during the First World War, and to Britain in 1920, Bronowski's parents having been married in Britain in the London house of his maternal grandfather in 1907.

Although, according to Jacob Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Britain, he gained admission to the Central Foundation Boys' School in London and went on to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge, graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1930.

Jacob Bronowski would pursue this sort of dual activity, in both the mathematical and literary worlds, throughout his professional life.

Jacob Bronowski was a strong chess player, earning a half-blue while at Cambridge and composing numerous chess problems for the British Chess Magazine between 1926 and 1970.

Jacob Bronowski received a PhD in mathematics at Cambridge in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry.

Subsequently, Jacob Bronowski became Director of Research for the National Coal Board in the UK, and an associate director of the Salk Institute from 1964.

In 1950, Jacob Bronowski was given the Taung Child's fossilised skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape to discriminate them from the teeth of apes.

In 1967 Jacob Bronowski delivered the six Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge.

Jacob Bronowski first became familiar to the British public through appearances on the BBC television version of The Brains Trust in the late 1950s.

Jacob Bronowski is best remembered for this 13-part series about the history of human life and scientific endeavour.

Jacob Bronowski died in 1974 of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York, a year after The Ascent of Man was first broadcast.