- 384BC-322BC
- Aristotle
- 310BC-230BC
- Aristarchus of Samos proposed the Heliocentric theory.
- 190BC-120BC
- Hipparchus of Rhodes measured the angular height of the star
Alpha Virginis above the ecliptic and compared it with 150-yr-old
Babylonian observations. From the change of 2 degrees,
he deduced that the Earth's axis precesses at 47 arc-seconds per year.
He also made detailed observations of the moon and
estimated the earth-moon distance with similar accuracy.
- 150AD
- Ptolemy knocks heliocentricity on the head because
it violates Aristotle's ideas.
Building on Hipparchus's work, he
wrote a detailed mathematical theory of the motions of
the Sun, Moon, and planets.
- 1564-1642
- Galileo
- 1546-1601
- Tycho Brahe
- 1571-1630
- Johannes Kepler
- 1629-1695
- Christiaan Huygens [In 1656 he patented the first pendulum clock and applied it to longitude determination.]
- 1643-1727 (1669-1687)
- Newton (Lucasian Professor in Cambridge)
- 1693-1776
- John Harrison. Master clockmaker.
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- 1736-1813
- Lagrange. Had 10 younger siblings only one of whom survived infancy.
His father, a military man, wasted his earnings; Lagrange viewed this
as good fortune: "Had I been rich, I might never have known
Mathematics". He founded the Turin Academy of Sciences.
- 1729.
- Laplace born. "The Newton of France." He published from 1766-1817.
Among his many achievements,
he put the (gamma-1)/gamma into the speed of sound.
- 1762
- Lagrange Method of Variations
- 1766
- Lagrange moved to Berlin (where Euler had been).
Won prizes for work on moon, Jupiter,
3-body problem and comets. Wrote "Analytical Mechanics", which
contained no diagrams.
- 1775
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- 1787
- Lagrange moved to Paris and became depressed.
- 1787
- publication commences of "Celestial Mechanics", Laplace's peak.
Biot assisted with the galleys.
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- Laplace is president of board of Longitudes.
Went into politics where he was useless. Was replaced
by Bonaparte.
- 1812
- Laplace's work on probability published. (Generating functions; inference)
- 1889, 1892
- Poincaré. Poincaré was first to consider the possibility of chaos in a deterministic system, in his work on planetary orbits.
Little interest was shown in this work until the modern study of chaotic dynamics began in 1963.
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