Education and Career
From 1954 until 1956, Sivin was enrolled in an 18 month language program for Chinese at the U.S. Army Language School. He then went on to receive his Bachelor of Science degree with a chemistry minor at MIT in June 1958. He received his MA in history of science at Harvard University in 1960, and his Ph.D. in history of science at Harvard University in 1966. He received an honorary M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1966, at MIT, Nathan Sivin served as an assistant professor of humanities, associate professor in 1969, and professor from 1972 until 1977, where he them moved to the University of Pennsylvania as a professor of Chinese culture and history of science.
Nathan Sivin has studied abroad on many occasions. From October 1961 to August 1962 he studied Chinese language and philosophy at Taipei in Taiwan. From August 1962 to March 1963 he studied the history of Chinese alchemy in Singapore and provided guest lectures there. From the 1960s until the 1980s he was an avid visitor to Kyoto in Japan, where he acted as a visiting professor, studied at the Research Institute of Humanistic Studies, and studied Chinese astronomy, alchemy, and medicine. From 1974 to 2000 he made numerous trips to Cambridge in order to study Chinese astronomy, visiting Gonville and Caius College, the Needham Research Institute, and St. John's College in the process. From the late 1970s until the late 1990s he traveled several times to the People's Republic of China. In September 1979 he lectured in seminars at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes of Paris, France, and at the Sinologisches Seminar at the University of Würzburg in Germany in 1981. Nathan Sivin also speaks several foreign languages, including Chinese, Japanese, German, and French.
Along with various responsibilities at the University of Pennsylvania, throughout his career Nathan Sivin was also an elective member of numerous societies and committees. This included the American Society for the Study of Religion, the Philomathean Society, the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences, the T'ang Studies Society, and many others.
Along with numerous book publications since the 1960s, Nathan Sivin also wrote many more essays from the 1960s onwards. He has also given over 200 lectures throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. He is currently working on several projects, including a biography on the Song Dynasty polymath scientist Shen Kuo and a translation into English of a Yuan Dynasty calendrical treatise published in 1279 AD, the Season-Granting (a hallmark of Chinese mathematical astronomy).
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