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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer living in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was born into a Jewish family and began to love mathematics in high school.
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Kuhn received his BSc, MSc and PhD from Harvard College, the later being under the tutelage of John Van Vleck.
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Thomas Kuhn was fortunate enough to interview the renowned Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, the day before Bohr's death
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While teaching both philosophy and history at the University of California, Berkeley, Kuhn penned and published his best known and most influential work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Kuhn talked about the idea of a paradigm and a paradigm shift in his book. The term, paradigm shift, is widely used across all disciplines, not just science. -
Michael Polanyi lectured that science is a relative discipline many years before Kuhn wrote about it. It is reported that Kuhn even attended lectures of Polanyi. Kuhn was accused of plagiarism and included Polanyi in the print of the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
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In 1994, Thomas Kuhn was diagnosed with throat and lung cancer. He died at the age of 73 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.