Anders Johan Lexell Johan Stén (2015): A Comet of the Enlightenment. Anders Johan Lexell's Life and Discoveries. Basel: Birkhäuser. Anders Johan Lexell Anders Johan Lexell (24 December 1740 – ) was a Finnish-Swedish astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who spent most of his life in Imperial Russia, where he was known as Andrei Ivanovich Leksel (Андрей Иванович Лексель). Lexell made important discoveries in polygonometry and celestial mechanics; the latter led to a comet named in his honour. La Grande Encyclopédie states that he was the prominent mathematician of his time who contributed to spherical trigonometry with new and interesting solutions, which he took as
Introduction to the metric system volt and farad in honour of Georg Ohm, Alessandro Volta and Michael Faraday respectively. This proposal had the support of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) who had been instrumental in forming the Committee of Electrical Standards of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The use of scientists' names for such units was subsequently extended to other units, including the watt named after James Watt and the degree Celsius named after Anders Celsius. Historically, individual units evolved which were based on the size and context of what was being measured. These units could avoid the need to use large numbers