Peter Blau
American sociologist · United States · On the map · Academics · Lived 1918 to 2002 · aged 84
Peter Michael Blau was an Austrian and American sociologist and theorist. Born in Vienna, Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1939. He completed his PhD doctoral thesis with Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in 1952, laying an early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy.
Peter Blau is read about 24 times a day, in 17 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 17 June 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
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The next year, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1953 to 1970. He also taught as Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in Great Britain, as a senior fellow at King's College, and as a Distinguished Honorary professor at Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences which he helped to establish. In 1970 he returned to Columbia University, where he was awarded the lifetime position of professor emeritus. From 1988 to 2000 he taught as the Robert Broughton Distinguished Research Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the same department as his wife, Judith Blau, while continuing to commute to New York to meet with graduate students and colleagues.
