Jacques Cassini

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Jacques Cassini (February 8, 1677 - April 18, 1756) was a French-Italian astronomer, son of the famous Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini.

Cassini was born at the Paris Observatory. Admitted at the age of seventeen to membership of the French Academy of Sciences, he was elected in 1696 a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and became maître des comptes in 1706. Having succeeded to his father's position at the observatory in 1712, he measured in 1713 the arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Perpignan, and published the results in a volume entitled Traité de la grandeur et de la figure de la terre (1720). He also wrote Eléments d'astronomie (1740), and died at Thury, near Clermont.

He published the first tables of the satellites of Saturn in 1716.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Jacques Cassini". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.