High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the sociology and philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively. As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history (and philosophy) of science.