Forest Ray Moulton
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Forest Ray Moulton (April 29, 1872 – December 7, 1952) was a U.S. astronomer.
He was born in Le Roy, Michigan, and was educated at Albion College. After graduating in 1894 (A.B.), he performed his graduate studies at the University of Chicago and gained a Ph.D. in 1899. At the University of Chicago he was associate in astronomy (1898-1900), instructor (1900-03), assistant professor (1903-08), associate professor (1908-12), and professor after 1912.[1]
He is noted for being a proponent, along with Thomas Chamberlin, of the hypothesis that planetismals had coallesced to form the solar system. Their hypothesis called for the close passage of another star to trigger this condensation, a concept that has since fallen out of favor.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, some additional small satellites were discovered to be in orbit around Jupiter. Dr. Moulton proposed that these were actually gravitationally-captured planetismals. This theory has become well-accepted among astronomers.
The Moulton crater on the Moon and the Adams-Moulton methods for solving differential equations are named after him.
[edit] Writings
He became an associate editor of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1907 and a research associate of the Carnegie Institution in 1908. Besides various contributions to mathematical and astronomical journals he was the author of:
- An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics (1902; second revised edition, 1914)
- An Introduction to Astronomy (1905)
- Descriptive Astronomy (1912)
- Periodic Orbits (1913)
[edit] External links
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Forest Ray Moulton". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
[edit] Obituaries
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