Undergraduates explore Yale Library’s collection of great scientific works

  • 17 young male and female science students pose, wearing black t-shirts with white lettering that reads "Wright Laboratory"
August 12, 2022

Seventeen undergraduates, from Yale and beyond, visited Beinecke Library this summer to study selected works of eminent scientists of the 16th through 18th centuries. They read and discussed 15 volumes—by Copernius, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Émilie du Châtelet, and others—which are housed in the collections of Beinecke and the Medical Historical Library. The philosophical and physical opinions (1655) by Margaret Cavendish Newcastle was “an unexpected hit,” according to Kayleigh Bohemier, science research support librarian at the Marx Science and Social Science Library. The students, Bohemier adds, were very surprised by the breadth of what “natural philosophy” meant during the period. Several students took selfies in front of Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687).

Bohemier curated and led the July 13 session, assisted by Anna Franz, Beinecke’s assistant head of access services.

Read more about the Wright Lab summer program.

—Deborah Cannarella

Photograph by Victoria Misenti, Physics department