derivation was standard, they expressed interesting relations, but they left me unsatisfied. I think I really wanted to use advanced mathematics that we have just learned in other courses, and operating ratios of astrophysical variables was not exactly that.

Now, the field of dynamical astronomy has a very long history, going back to Kepler, Newton, Laplace, Le Verrier, Poincaré and Brouwer, to mention just a few names. The mathematical methods these guys developed are fantastic. They include Hamiltonians, perturbation theories, resonances, chaos. Finally, I had the satisfactory feeling of actually using mathematics to understand fragments of the physical world. My colleagues got discouraged for exactly the same reason, and moved to other research, as far from the Hamiltonians as they could. The subject of my Master thesis was an obscure topic of orbital dynamics of asteroids near resonances with Jupiter, the scope of my doctorate was only inches broader. Still, these early days gave a good dose of useful scientific background.

The exoplanet discoveries in the past two decades were one of two revolutions that I witnessed at close range (the other one being the Velvet Revolution of 1989). New exoplanets are announced every month. The smallest, the one with 