Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin

Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin was an American geologist and educator born September 25, 1843, in Mattoon, Illinois, who died November 15, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, and who recognized multiple episodes of glaciation during the Pleistocene through geological mapping in Wisconsin, developed theories about atmospheric carbon dioxide role in climate change, and, with Forest Ray Moulton, proposed the Chamberlin-Moulton planetesimal hypothesis, a theory of solar system formation that challenged the earlier Laplacian nebular hypothesis. He founded the Journal of Geology in 1893 and served as its editor for many years, and published the landmark 1890 and 1897 paper The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses, an influential contribution to scientific methodology. He served as chief geologist for the Wisconsin geological survey from 1876, headed the glacial division of the United States Geological Survey from 1881, was president of the University of Wisconsin from 1887 to 1892, and later taught at the University of Chicago. He won the Hayden Memorial Geological Award in 1920, the Penrose Gold Medal of the Society of Economic Geologists in 1924, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1901, the National Academy of Sciences in 1903 and the American Philosophical Society in 1905, served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1894 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1908, and received the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America in 1927.