REMINISCENCE OF A ROVING SCHOLAR
Science, Humanities and Joseph Needham
by Ho Peng Yoke (Director Emeritus, Needham Research Institute, Cambridge)
This fascinating book presents the unusual career of a scientist of Chinese Malaysian origin, Ho Peng Yoke, who became a humanist and rendered his services to both Eastern and Western intellectual worlds. It describes how Ho adapted to working under changing social and academic environments in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong and England. His activities also covered East Asia, Europe and North America.
Ho Peng Yoke worked in collaboration with Joseph Needham of Cambridge over different periods spanning half a century in the monumental series Science and Civilization in China. Ho subsequently succeeded Needham as Director of the Needham Research Institute, where he held the post for 12 years. In the introduction to the final volume of that series, the Oxford scholar Mark Elvin remarked that Ho “had long piloted the ship through difficult times.” This book tells the story and more.
Contents:
- Foreword
- Early Years and Parentage
- Career as a Physicist
-
Professor of Chinese at Kuala Lumpur
- A New Australian University
- The University of Hong Kong
- Return to Griffith University
- The Needham Research Institute
Readership: General audience with an interest in sciences and the humanities.
“Professor Ho’s contribution was a double one, first as a leading expert in the interpretation of Chinese astronomy, then as the man who rescued Needham’s project, and his Research Institute ... This book can be recommended to anyone interested in the cross-currents of modern intellectual life in all its international complexity and in the story of one person’s remarkable success in navigating through them.”
Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd
Needham Research Institute, UK |
“This autobiography is well worth reading for it contains a great deal of first-hand information concerning the overseas studies on Chinese science and technology over the past fifty years, and also because of Ho's close relationship with Joseph Needham and the Needham Research Institute, and in addition, it presents a full picture of his own remarkable character.”
| The Chinese Journal for the History of Science and Technology |
“This volume of reminiscences is therefore more than welcome ... his unique blend of humanistic and scientific scholarship will surely provide inspiration within his field for years to come, and to know something of the scholar behind them is a real treat.”
| Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies |
| 252pp |
Pub. date: Oct 2005 |
