B.F. Skinner, 86, died of leukemia last month in Cambridge, Mass. The noted behaviorist had received a lifetime achievement award two days earlier from the American Psychological Association at its meeting in Boston, during which he offered a 15-minute address on his work.
Born in Susquehanna, Pa., in 1904, Burrhus Frederic Skinner earned his B.A. at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., in 1926 and received his Ph.D. in 1931 from Harvard. He joined the psychology department at the University of Minnesota in 1936 and returned to Harvard University in 1947. He officially retired in 1974 but remained an active figure on campus and in his lab.
His two most important works are The Behavior of Organisms (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938) and Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953). Both have received an unusually high number of citations since 1966, the earliest date for which citation records are available....