Boscovich

Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich

Born: 18 May 1711 in Ragusa, Dalmatia, Venetian territory (now Dubrovnik, Croatia)
Died: 13 Feb 1787 in Milan, Italy

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Boscovich studied at the Collegium Romanum in Rome and was appointed professor of mathematics there in 1740. He was one of the first in continental Europe to accept Newton's gravitational theories and he wrote 70 papers on optics, astronomy, gravitation, meterology and trigonometry.

His main work was in mathematical physics. In his study of the shape of the Earth he used the idea of minimising the sum of the absolute values of the deviations. His solution to this minimising problem took a geometric form. Boscovich was the first to give a procedure to compute a planet's orbit from 3 observations of its position and he also gave a procedure for determining the equator of a planet from 3 observations of a surface feature.

Boscovich became professor of mathematics at Pavia in 1764 and was director of Brera Observatory. He led an expedition to California in 1769 to observe a transit of Venus. From 1773 to 1783 he worked in Paris.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Boskovic, The Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia (Zagreb, 1956).
  4. E Proverbio, R G Boscovich's Determination of Instrumental Errors in Observation, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 38 (1988), 135-152.
  5. P Bursill-Hall (ed.), R J Boscovich : Vita e attività scientifica : His life and scientific work (Rome, 1993). 
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