16 lives in this collection worked in celestial mechanics, from 1571 to today. Each has a full course on their life and the mathematics and physics they made.
Often together with: mathematical physics, astronomy, differential equations, number theory, potential theory, probability theory, analysis, calculus of variations, differential geometry, fluid dynamics. All fields
Discoverer of the three laws of planetary motion and founder of modern optics, who made astronomy a physical science.
astronomy, optics, mathematics
Astronomer who predicted the return of the comet that bears his name, financed and published Newton's Principia, and founded the life table and the magnetic chart.
astronomy, celestial mechanics, geophysics
The most prolific mathematician in history, who shaped modern analysis and notation, founded graph theory, and wrote the equations of rigid bodies and ideal fluids.
analysis, number theory, graph theory
Leading French Newtonian who derived the figure of the Earth from hydrostatics, resolved the motion of the lunar apogee and predicted the 1759 return of Halley's comet.
geodesy, celestial mechanics, differential geometry
French mathematician and philosopher who founded dynamics on d'Alembert's principle, solved the wave equation, and co-edited the Encyclopédie.
mechanics, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics
Founder of analytical mechanics and the calculus of variations, discoverer of the Lagrange points, and author of the four-square theorem and the resolvent method that led to group theory.
calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, celestial mechanics
Author of the Mécanique céleste, who established the stability of the solar system to first order, founded potential theory and made probability a science of inference.
celestial mechanics, potential theory, probability theory
Self-taught mathematician and science writer whose Mechanism of the Heavens brought Laplace's celestial mechanics into English and whose Connexion of the Physical Sciences prompted the coining of the word 'scientist'.
celestial mechanics, mathematical physics, physical geography
Leading French mathematical physicist after Laplace, known for Poisson's equation, the Poisson bracket, the Poisson kernel and summation formula, and the Poisson distribution.
mathematical physics, celestial mechanics, potential theory
Astronomer who predicted the position of Neptune from the perturbations of Uranus, found the anomalous advance of Mercury's perihelion, and built the theories of all the major planets.
celestial mechanics, astronomy, meteorology
Heilbronn physician who in 1842 first published the conservation of energy as a universal principle and computed the mechanical equivalent of heat from gas data.
thermodynamics, physiology, medicine
Scottish physicist who unified electricity, magnetism and light in a field theory and introduced statistical methods into physics.
electromagnetism, kinetic theory, statistical mechanics
Universal mathematician who created automorphic functions, the qualitative theory of dynamical systems and algebraic topology, discovered chaos in the three-body problem, and formulated the Lorentz group of relativity.
complex analysis, differential equations, celestial mechanics
Founder of the modern theory of stability of motion, author of Lyapunov functions and exponents, and prover of the central limit theorem by characteristic functions.
stability theory, differential equations, probability theory
Italian mathematician who co-founded tensor calculus with Ricci-Curbastro, introduced parallel transport in Riemannian geometry, regularized binary collisions in the three-body problem, and was dismissed under the 1938 racial laws.
differential geometry, tensor calculus, rational mechanics
Number theorist whose theorems on Diophantine equations, class numbers, quadratic forms, modular forms of several variables and small divisors each founded a field.
number theory, diophantine approximation, transcendence theory