In most people’s minds Edmond Halley is remembered for one thing. No, he was not a rock star of the 1950’s, but he did have something in common with that rock star. Like the rock star, Edmond
In most people’s minds Edmond Halley is remembered for one thing. No, he was not a rock star of the 1950’s, but he did have something in common with that rock star. Like the rock star, Edmond Halley is associated with a comet - Halley’s Comet - but Edmond Halley was more.
Edmond Halley was an able scientist/mathematician and began his career as a major astronomer by having a paper published on theoretical astronomy as a college student. This happened only twenty years after his birth on October 29, 1656 in Hagerston (near London) in England.
All during Edmond’s early life he was interested in science, especially astronomy. He said, “from my tenderest youth I gave myself over to the consideration of Astronomy.” He was intrigued with science which gave Halley “so great a pleasure as is impossible to explain to anyone who has not experienced it” Besides being known as a highly intelligent youth Edmond was named captain of his school, St. Paul, at age 15. He grew up as simply a normal boy with a sense of humor and a great charm of manner.
Edmond continued his education at Queen’s College, Oxford at the age of 17. He was “particularly taken notice of for the extraordinary advances he made at the same time in the Mathematics.”
Edmond left Oxford before graduating and he did not receive a degree but this did not hinder his achievements in mathematics and science. Later on he did receive three honorary degrees from Oxford.
In mathematics Edmond Halley contributed much. Edmond devoted several papers that greatly improved the theory of equations in algebra. He also prepared papers about the doctrine of logarithms and the property of sections of a cone. He also was one of the pioneers in social statistics by calculating annuities from mortality tables. All of this brilliant work in mathematics earned him the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford in 1704. While a professor at Oxford Edmond published important editions of the work of Apollonius of Pega and of other ancient geometricians.
Using the tools of mathematics it was in the field of the physical sciences, especially astronomy that Edmond excelled. He catalogued the positions of about 350 Southern Hemisphere stars and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun. Edmond later urged that the latter phenomenon and future transits of Venus be used to find out the distance of the Sun.
Edmond Halley worked out a theory of the orbits of co