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Huygens patented the first pendulum clock, which greatly increased the accuracy of time measurement.
Tutored at home by private teachers, Huygens later studied law and mathematics at the University of Leiden and the College of Orange at Breda. His most productive period (1650-66) was spent at The Hague in relative solitude. However his long stay from 1666 to 1681 in Paris was spent with some of the greatest scientists of the age.
Huygens's first publications in 1651 and 1654 considered mathematical problems, but he soon he turned to lens grinding. Using one of his own lenses, Huygens detected, in 1655, the first moon of Saturn.
The following year he discovered the true shape of the rings of Saturn and in Systema Saturnium (1659), Huygens explained the phases and changes in the shape of the ring.
In 1656 Huygens patented the first pendulum clock, which greatly increased the accuracy of time measurement. In the Horologium Oscillatorium sive de motu pendulorum (1673) he described the theory of pendulum motion. He also derived the law of centrifugal force for uniform circular motion. As a result of this Huygens, Hooke, Halley and Wren formulated the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction
His short tract De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae in 1657 was the first printed work on probability. It was prompted by the work of Pascal and Fermat which Huygens learned of during his time in Paris.
His work on the collision of elastic bodies showed the error Descartes' laws of impact. In his Traité de la lumiere (1678), Huygens argued in favour of a wave theory of light. Huygens stated that an expanding sphere of light behaves as if each point on the wave front were a new source of radiation of the same frequency and phase.
In the final years of his life Huygens composed one of the earliest discussions of extraterrestrial life, published after his death as the Cosmotheoros (1698).
Huygens described the 31-tone equal temperament in Lettre touchant le cycle
harmonique . This has led indirectly to a tradition of 31-tone music in the Netherlands in this century.
References elsewhere in this archive:
Tell me about the pendulum
Tell me about the theory of collisions
Huygens was one of the first to investigate caustic curves produced by light under reflection and refraction. Tell me about caustics and show me the caustic of a circle
Among the curves studied by Huygens were the Catenary, the Cissoid of Diocles, the Cycloid, the Epicycloid, the Hypocycloid, the Involute of a circle, the Semi-cubical parabola, the Nephroid, the Serpentine and the Tractrix.
Other Web sites:
Rice University, USA
Florence, Italy
Clarke University, USA
References:
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