In 1649 he accompanied the mission of Henry, count of Nassau, to Denmark, and in 1651 entered the lists of science as an assailant of the unsound system of quadratures adopted by Gregory of St Vincent. His mathematical bent, however, soon diverted him from legal studies, and the perusal of some of his earliest theorems enabled Descartes to predict his future greatness. van Schooten, and completed in the juridical school of Breda. From his father he received the rudiments of his education, which was continued at Leiden under A. He was the second son of Sir Constantijn Huygens. The subject of photometry remained in its infancy until Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert. HUYGENS, CHRISTIAAN (1629–1695), Dutch mathematician, mechanician, astronomer and physicist, was born at the Hague on the 14th of April 1629. He then calculated that the angle of this hole was 1/27,664th the diameter of the Sun, and thus it was about 30,000 times as far away, on the (incorrect) assumption that Sirius is as bright our sun. He made a series of smaller holes in a screen facing the sun, until he estimated the light was of the same intensity as that of the star Sirius. It was also in this book that Huygens published his method for estimating stellar distances. Huygens postulated that the great distance between the planets signified that God had not intended for beings on one to know about the beings on the others, and had not foreseen how much humans would advance in scientific knowledge. He argued that extraterrestrial life is neither confirmed nor denied by the Bible, and questioned why God would create the other planets if they were not to serve a greater purpose than that of being admired from Earth. He took his observations of dark and bright spots on the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter to be evidence of water and ice on those planets. Huygens wrote that availability of water in liquid form was essential for life and that the properties of water must vary from planet to planet to suit the temperature range. The work, translated into English in its year of publication, has been seen as in the fanciful tradition of Francis Godwin, John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac, and fundamentally Utopian and also to owe in its concept of planet to cosmography in the sense of Peter Heylin. Such speculations were not uncommon at the time, justified by Copernicanism or the plenitude principle. In it he speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life, on other planets, which he imagined was similar to that on Earth. Shortly before his death in 1695, Huygens completed Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698. Descartes was impressed by his skills in geometry. In 1644 Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz de Jonge Stampioen, who set the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. His father gave him a liberal education: he studied languages and music, history and geography, mathematics, logic and rhetoric, but also dancing, fencing and horse riding. He liked to play with miniatures of mills and other machines. Huygens was educated at home until turning sixteen years old. His friends included Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes. The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637).Ĭonstantijn Huygens was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange, and also a poet and musician. She died in 1637, shortly after the birth of Huygens' sister. Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance.Ĭhristiaan Huygens was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague, into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens. His work included early telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping. Huygens was a leading scientist of his time. He is known particularly as an astronomer, physicist, probabilist and horologist. Christiaan Huygens, FRS (/ˈhaɪɡənz/ or /ˈhɔɪɡənz/ Dutch: (Latin: Hugenius) (14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician and scientist.
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