A. C. Crombie

Alistair Cameron Crombie (4 November 1915 – 9 February 1996) was an Australian historian of science who began his career as a zoologist. He was noted for his contributions to research on competition between species before turning to history.

Born in Brisbane, Australia, Crombie studied at the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge. In the early 1950s, he taught at University College, London. In 1953, he was given a position at Oxford, as that school's first lecturer in the history of science. During Crombie's tenure at Oxford, the history of science was added to the graduate level offerings of Oxford's history faculty.^[1]

During his career as a historian of science, Crombie identified thematic threads or "styles" in the development of European approaches to science. He published his ideas in 1994 in a definitive 3-volume work, entitled, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition : The History of Argument and Explanation especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts.

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