Mary Terrall

Biography

We are sadden to relay the news that Mary Terrall passed away on Monday, September 11.  Mary will be remembered as a kind, pleasant, brilliant colleague who gave so much to the History Department, the History of Science field, our students, and the university.

We send our sincere condolences to Mary’s sons, Adam and Noah, and their families, to her siblings, and to her partner Ted.

In Memoriam for Mary Terrall
Known internationally for her groundbreaking research on 18th century science, Mary Terrall died on September 11, 2023. She lost a fatal encounter with an aggressive cancer, which carried her away within a year of first being diagnosed. She had just commenced her retirement, and the promise of all that could have resulted will never be. But she left behind a formidable body of work that crossed the terrain from Newtonian mechanics and French intellectual history to the life sciences, augmented by her interest in global exploration and collecting. Mary worked at her own pace, and it gave her scholarship an award-winning quality. Consistently she received the prize for the best in the field. Each of her books, augmented by a large volume of reviews and essays, will receive a brief appreciation. But what we, her friends and colleagues, remember most of Mary was her extraordinary qualities as a human being.

Mary could see the humor in life’s travails. When relaxed with colleagues or students she talked candidly about the pressures imposed by bureaucratic demands on faculty time. She loved a good gossip on the “ins” and “outs” of academic prestige. At field seminars where she often chaired, her attendance exceeded the expected as did her graciousness toward the speaker – often a visitor from elsewhere. Never in the decades we have known her did any of us see a lack of tact, or humor, or a willingness to cut corners to save her own time. Being earnest and serious about her responsibilities extended to Mary’s treatment of science. She had an unmatched ability to historicize science, while never suggesting that it could be reduced to its social relations.

In all of Mary’s writing the persona of the scientist, the self-presentation, was always front and center.  In The Man who Flattened the Earth Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Maupertuis appears before the reader as a careful steward of this persona. Eager to be recognized by those who mater in society, he presented himself as a serious explorer (of Lapland) whose sole purpose is to definitively establish the shape of the earth, and thereby the truth of Newtonian physics.  His mathematical training gave him serious credentials and so too did his willingness to venture forth where the terrain was not only cold but also life-threatening. No less stressful, perhaps, was Maupertuis’ life as an academician and royal courtier in both Paris and Berlin, positions that set him on a never-ending quest for fame and prestige. Mary’s scrupulous analysis of Maupertuis’ social positioning humanizes him and places him firmly in the context of his times, but in no way diminishes his stature as a scientist. And so, Mary complements this account with a deep and detailed study of his mathematical and physical science. We gain new insight into the social foundations of enlightenment science just as we acquire a detailed understanding of Maupertuis’s contribution to it.

Recognition from Mary’s peers followed swiftly. Her article on the debates surrounding Maupertuis’s expedition, “Representing the Earth’s Shape: The Polemics Surrounding Maupertuis’s Expedition to Lapland” (Isis 83, 1992: 218-237) was awarded the History of Science Society’s Price Prize. Some years later, The Man who Flattened the Earth was recognized as the best book of the year in the history of science field (the Pfizer award) and for the entirety of eighteenth-century studies (the Gotschalk Award). And lest it be imagined that the public space for science had somehow been gender neutral Mary was among the first to point out the opposite and its effect on the lives of the women who ventured forth into that privileged space. This she did in another and prize-winning essay, “Emilie du Châtelet and the Gendering of Science,” History of Science 33 (1995): 283-310. (Winner of Women in Science Prize, History of Science Society, 1998).

Time spent in the lofty regions of Newtonian science might spoil any historian, but not Mary. After Maupertuis, she turned to bugs, frogs, even birds, and the people who studied them. In natural history before Buffon Mary found largely under-studied terrain (Catching Nature in the Act. Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century, University of Chicago Press, 2014) and made it her business to try to recapture the tedium and patience required to figure out how frogs fornicate, how waterlogged insects use their tails to breath, how various species manage to reproduce themselves. Having consigned natural history to being a lesser form of scientific activity previous historians thought that not much of significance happened before Buffon. Mary Terrall changed all of that. In response, another award came to her second book, the Thackray Medal, from the British Society for the History of Natural History. She demonstrated definitively how detailed observation, coupled with the search for explanations that could be replicable, always guided the careful work of the naturalist. In the case of Réaumur a piety based upon physico-theology guided his painstaking search through the small creatures that captured his imagination. Mary could understand the religious impulse just as she dealt with the deeply secular motivations of Maupertuis.

Despite a steady stream of professional prizes and awards throughout her career, Mary was as modest and unassuming as a scholar of her standing can be. She lived her life in ways that made it easy to forget who she was and her high standing in our profession. We have tried here to commemorate her intellectual rigor and originality. Our sadness, however, now permeates UCLA’s History Department and leaves us bereft. We want you back with us, Mary. Your departure leaves voids in our lives, but also and especially in the lives of her partner in life, Ted Porter, and her sons, Adam and Noah, her relatives and many cherished friends.

In deep mourning,
Margaret Jacob
Amir Alexander

Elegy from Ted Porter and Norton Wise