Susan G. Sterrett

Susan G. Sterrett is the Curtis D. Gridley Distinguished Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science in the Department of Philosophy at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She earned an undergraduate degree in engineering at Cornell University in 1977, after which she worked as an engineer for several years. She completed degrees in Mathematics (M.A.) and Philosophy (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Pittsburgh, completing her doctorate in December 1999, with a dissertation entitled How Beliefs Make A Difference. During graduate school, she also wrote and published Sounds Like Light: Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity and Mach's Work in Acoustics and Aerodynamics She then taught at Duke University. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Foundation fellowship for work on Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World, published by Penguin in 2005. Other publications include articles on Darwin's use of analogy, on Wittgenstein and gramophone records, on Alan Turing and the philosophy of artificial intelligence, and on the use of models in science.

She spent a term at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in Spring 2010, then taught at Carnegie Mellon University while finishing Three Views of Logic: Mathematics, Philosophy, Computer Science, co-authored with the computer scientist Donald W. Loveland and the mathematician Richard E. Hodel.