Biographical Memoirs Volume 57 (1987) / Chapter Skim
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Paul Herget
Paul Herget
Pages 58-87
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write and always signed himself Paul Herget. He liked to assert that "he was his own person anct click not want the name of someone else tagging along with him." 59
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factory with his father; after he gracluated from high school in 1926 he got a temporary position as a surveyor with the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company. That fall he enterect the University of Cincinnati as a civil engineering stuclent.
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. GRADUATE STUDIES The Cincinnati Observatory is the oldest astronomical research observatory west of the Alleghenies.
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This was his first scientific publication. Working at the Cincinnati Observatory under ctirector Everett I
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the daughter of Elliot S Smith, his superior at the Cincinnati Observatory.
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Spencer tones, president of the International Astronomical Union, Brouwer asked Herget to operate a minor planet center. Paul was familiar with what was required from his previous activities, and he readily agreed.
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Moulton hacI contributed greatly to ballistic computations during WorIct War I, Herget sought to do the same during World War Il. He began by contacting government officials at the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and at the Naval Weapons Center at DahIgren, Virginia.
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His research results "Rectangular Coordinates of Ceres, PalIas, Juno, and Vesta," "The Solar Coordinates, 1800-2000," and the "Coordinates of Venus, ~ 800-2000"—were all published in the Astronomical Papers of the American Ephemeris. COMPUTER APPElCATIONS In 1928 Ernest W
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From ~ 947 to ~ 95 ~ the Cincinnati Observatory had an IBM tabulator, multiplier, sorter, and reproducer; after ~ 95 ~ Herget used computing equipment when it was available—at the Procter & Gamble Company, the General Electric Company, and the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company. He worked with the computers only when company employees were not using them usually at night or on weekends.
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After IBM got the contract, he set up the computer program for calculating the orbits for Mercury launches. THE CINCINNATI OBSERVATORY The research of Paul Herget centered around orbit computations anct the use of computer programs.
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For almost ten years only a few new advanced textbooks hacl been published. The astronomers urged Herget to publish his lecture notes; the result was The Computation of Orbits, one of the first astronomy texts written using vector notation.
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Of equal or greater importance was the instruction, both formal and informal, that Paul gave to faculty members and graduate students regarding the importance and use of computers. He was thus extremely influential in the development of computers for education and research at the University of Cincinnati.
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In response to questions concerning the interests of other astronomers and what other scientists were doing, he would say: "To each his own." Although Paul expressed little if any interest in the physical properties of asteroids or in their origin or evolutionhis work played a part in the renaissance of physical stucties of these objects that began in the 1960s. For twenty years when there was very little interest in minor planets elsewhere, he had archivect the positional observations and used them to calculate orbits and ephemerides.
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HONORS Over the course of his long professional life, Paul Herget received many honors. In 1962 he became the sixth Ohioan
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In his hometown Herget was widely recognized as "Cincinnati's best known astronomer," the acknowledged local expert who was always interviewocI by the newspapers on any astronomical story from artificial satellites to the distant reaches of the universe. The Cincinnati Technical and Scientific Council, of which he was a longtime member, named him Engineer of the Year in 1957, anti the University of Cincinnati Alumni Association awarded him its William Howard Taft Medal in 1965.
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A small tax rate that had been written into the city charter years before as a permanent source of income for the Cincinnati Observatory was also given up by the university negotiators over Paul's bitter objections—in the act that transferred ownership to the state. With Herget's retirement imminent anc} the future of the Cincinnati Observatory uncertain, in 1977 the International Astronomical Union decidect that it hac!
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In 1965 Harriet Herget hacI developed cancer, anct in the course of her treatment Paul met many of the outstanding physicians on the University of Cincinnati Medical School faculty. Deeply moved by his wife's illness, Paul worked directly with doctors at Holmes Hospital in developing a computer program for the Cancer Control Council Neoplastic Disease Registry, which contained data on tens of thousands of patients.
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Naval Observatory in Washington; his correspondence with various Lick Observatory astronomers, preserved in the Mary Lea Shane Archives of Lick Observatory; his autobiographical sketch, on file at the National Academy of Sciences; the file of newspaper clippings and news releases about him at the Office of Information Services of the University of Cincinnati; and the transcript of a far-ranging interview he gave David DeVorkin in 1977, which is on file at the American Institute of Physics. We also benefited from the recollections of his friends and colleagues and not least from the memories of two once-young Cincinnati boys whom he inspired to become astronomers.
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. Tables for true anomaly and perihelion passage in nearly parabolic orbits.
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I., 46:156. Elements and approximate perturbations offll 75)
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Soc., 10:225. 1943 Ephemeris of comet Oterma II.
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1948 :48-49. Comet Oterma (1943A)
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Minor planets.
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Soc., 116:218. Resume of minor planet perturbation computations at the Cincinnati Observatory.
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I., 70: 1-3. 1966 The Minor Planet Center at the Cincinnati Observatory.
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Gehrels. The Palomar-Leiden survey of faint minor planets.
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1973 Plate constants for the Bordeaux zone of the Astrographic Catalogue.
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The Palomar-Leiden survey of faint minor planets: Conclusion. Icarus, 59:1-19.
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