Scott L. Montgomery (born May 30, 1951) is an American author, geoscientist, public lecturer, and affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is widely known for his writings on energy matters, intellectual history, language and translation, and history of science. His book, The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Built the Modern World (2015), with co-author Daniel Chirot, was selected by The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the most notable books of 2015. His articles have appeared in many journals, including Forbes, Newsweek, History Today, Science, and Nature.
Early life and education Scott Lyons Montgomery was born on May 30, 1951, the son of Kay C. Montgomery and Shirley Lyons Montgomery, in Ithaca New York. His father was an experimental psychologist (PhD, University of Chicago, 1948), who had done research at Harvard and Cornell Universities before moving to Yale. An unfortunate series of incidents led to the father committing suicide in 1956. Scott and his brother, Bruce, were raised by their mother, eventually moving to Kensington, Maryland in the Washington D.C. area. She remarried In 1971, to Russell Allen. Scott attended Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland and then went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. At Knox, he majored in chemistry for the first several years, spending a semester at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, then switched to English, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He entered a PhD program in geological sciences at Cornell University, deciding to finish with an M.S. degree when his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After her death in 1979, he moved to Japan, where he taught English in a private Tokyo academy and immersed himself in Japanese culture and language.
Career Returning to the U.S. in 1982, he found work in the energy industry as a petroleum geoscientist and as a translator of scientific material (Japanese to English). He worked both as an independent consulting geologist and writer/editor, performing contract work for companies, investors, energy funds, and other entities. During a stint with Petroleum Information Corp., and on a contract basis after leaving the company, he wrote a monograph series, Petroleum Frontiers, eventually completing 74 individual volumes. During a year with International Human Resources Development Corp. (IHRDC), he authored two textbooks, Structural Geology and Exploration for Marginal Marine Sandstones. In 1995, he was selected by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) to author a new series of technical papers in the AAPG Bulletin titled "E&P [Exploration & Production] Notes." Between 1995 and 2002, Montgomery wrote approximately 50 of these papers, which gained a wide international readership and set a new standard for concise analyses of oil and gas plays. Many of these papers continue to be widely read two decades after they were published. He also contributed articles to various trade journals, special technical volumes, and symposia. During this time, Montgomery began work as an independent scholar, publishing essays, articles, and books on themes that involved both science and the humanities. He continued his two careers for more than a decade, adding a third in 2004, becoming an affiliate faculty member in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington (Seattle). In 2008, he ceased work as a consulting geologist in the energy industry and expanded his teaching on energy-related subjects, climate change, English as a global language, and intellectual history. He was honored with the Jackson School Student Service teaching award in 2015.
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