Norman Thrower was a professor in UCLA's geography department from 1957 to 1990, where he specialized in cartography, remote sensing, and Europe. He was the director of the (Columbus) Quincentenary Programs at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the director of the Clark Library at UCLA. The collection consists of lecture notes and pamphlets on the 1986 Halley's Comet and the subsequent Newton-Halley volume, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of Newton and Halley (1990), which Thrower produced with colleagues, along with relevant correspondence.

Normal Thrower was born in England in 1919. He served in India during World War II and afterwards he joined the Directorate of Colonial (later Overseas) Surveys. Desiring an academic background, he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in geography at the University of Virginia in 1953. He then earned his Ph.D. degree in geography in 1958 at the University of Wisconsin. His dissertation concerned cadastral survey systems, used to establish legal property boundaries, and it was later published by the Association of American Geographers as Original Survey and Land Subdivision: A Comparative Study of the Form and Effect of Contrasting Cadastral Surveys (1966).

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