Noel M. Swerdlow, an emeritus professor in the department of astronomy and astrophysics and the department of history at the University of Chicago, is currently a visiting associate in history at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (Princeton University Press, 1998) and is coeditor with Trevor H. Levere of a collection of 80 papers by Stillman Drake, titled Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science (University of Toronto Press, 1999).