Price was born in
Leyton, England, to Philip Price, a
tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. He began work in 1938 as an assistant in a physics laboratory at the
South West Essex Technical College, before studying
Physics and
Mathematics at the
University of London, where he received a
Bachelor of Science in 1942. He then worked as an assistant to Harry Lowery carrying out research on hot and molten metals, and working towards a
London external
Ph.D. in
experimental physics, which he obtained in 1946. This work led to several research papers and to a patent for an emissive-correcting optical pyrometer. He then went to the USA on a
Commonwealth Fund fellowship, working in Pittsburgh and Princeton, returning to England in 1947. He was married that year to Ellen Hjorth in Copenhagen. In 1948 Price took a three-year position as a teacher of applied mathematics at Raffles College, Singapore, which was to become part of the
National University of Singapore. There he met
C. Northcote Parkinson, the naval historian, who stimulated a love of history in Price that would change the direction of his career. While in Singapore, he formulated his theory on the exponential growth of science. He was looking after the university's complete run of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, while Raffles College had its library built. He started reading these, and as he placed the volumes in chronological order he noticed that their yearly height increased exponentially with time. This led to a presentation at the Sixth International Congress of the History of Science in Amsterdam, in 1950. Price received a Nuffield Foundation award for research in the History of science, which enabled him to work on scientific instruments during 1955–1956. He first prepared a catalogue of the instrument collection of the British Museum, and then a catalogue of all the ancient astrolabes that he was able to locate. While working on his Ph.D. in Cambridge, Price met
Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese science. As a result of his work on the Equatorium Price was invited to participate in a project on medieval Chinese astronomical clocks. This led to the book
Heavenly Clockwork by Needham,
Wang Ling and Price, which was published in 1960. This machine had been retrieved from a wreck off the Greek island of
Antikythera in 1900, and its function had remained unknown. Price started working on this in the 1950s, and continued on and off for twenty years using various techniques including gamma radiography. He published two papers on the mechanism, in 1959 and 1974, showing that it was a planetary computer, dating from about 80 BCE. Clock, from a Bulletin of the Smithsonian Institution (1959) After obtaining his second doctorate, Price found advancement difficult in England. One colleague alleged that Price, who came from a lower-class background, was "not socially house-trained," and he suspected that he was turned down for university positions for personal reasons. Price decided to move to the
United States. In 1957 he became a consultant to the
Smithsonian Institution, and then a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey. At Princeton he studied ancient astronomy with
Otto Neugebauer. In 1959 he joined the Department of History at
Yale University initially as a one-year visitor. He would remain at Yale for the rest of his life. Price became Professor of the History of Science, and on Fulton's death in 1960 became chairman of the department. In 1962 he became the Avalon Professor of the History of Science. Price died of a heart attack at the home of his oldest friend,
Anthony Michaelis, in London, during a visit to attend the wedding of his niece. He was survived by his wife, Ellen, and their three children, Linda, Jeffrey, and Mark. In 1984, Price received, posthumously, the
ASIS Research Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information science. Since 1984, the
Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal is awarded by the
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics to scientists with outstanding contributions to the fields of quantitative studies of science. ==Scientific contributions==