This is the official website of Derek John de Solla Price meant to honor and share Price’s recorded lectures, ideas, and written texts.
The Lectures
Lectures include what Derek described as “the world’s first canned University course”. In other words, this site exclusively features what could very well be described as the world’s first “online course” titled “Neolithic to Now”.
The course was aimed at 101 level students at Yale in 1976 with the intention of using technology (then audio tape) to share a Yale university course with people all around the world. This course follows the evolution of man and technology and is rather mind blowing.
Listen to Derek de Solla Price’s lecture series now.
Who Runs This Site?
This site is run by Derek’s family who holds the copyrights to all content published on this site (aside from where noted). Do not republish without permission.
Below is an Excerpt From Wikipedia.
Derek John de Solla Price (22 January 1922 – 3 September 1983) was a physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, credited as the father of scientometrics.
Price’s major scientific contributions include:
- Studies of the exponential growth of science and the half-life of scientific literature; together with the formulation of Price’s Law, namely that 25% of scientific authors are responsible for 75% of published papers (Price 1963);
- Quantitative studies of the network of citations between scientific papers (Price 1965), including the discovery that both the in- and out-degrees of a citation network have power-law distributions, making this the first published example of a scale-free network;
- Price’s model, a mathematical theory of the growth of citation networks, based on what would now be called a preferential attachment process (Price 1976);
- An analysis of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek analogue computer and astronomical instrument (Price 1959, 1974).