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86-404: Christiaan Huygens , Lord of Zeelhem , FRS ( / ˈ h aɪ ɡ ən z / HY -gənz , US also / ˈ h ɔɪ ɡ ən z / HOY -gənz ; Dutch: [ˈkrɪstijaːn ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] ; also spelled Huyghens ; Latin : Hugenius ; 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a Dutch mathematician , physicist , engineer , astronomer , and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in

172-649: A diplomat for more than one year in England, he was knighted by King James I . This marked the end of Constantijn's formative years, and of his youth. During his time in England, in December 1622, he was robbed of his papers and £200 in gold from his coach as he set out on the way to Newmarket . Huygens was employed as a secretary to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange , who—after the death of Maurits of Orange—was appointed as stadtholder . In 1626 Constantijn fell in love with Suzanna van Baerle after earlier courtship by

258-410: A liberal education , studying languages, music , history , geography , mathematics , logic , and rhetoric , alongside dancing , fencing and horse riding . In 1644, Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz Stampioen , who assigned the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. Descartes was later impressed by his skills in geometry, as was Mersenne, who christened him

344-505: A pike and a musket . In 1614 Constantijn wrote his first Dutch poem, inspired by the French poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas , in which he praises rural life. In his early 20s, he fell in love with Dorothea; however, their relationship did not last and Dorothea met someone else. In 1616, Maurits and Constantijn started studies at Leiden University . Studying in Leiden was primarily seen as

430-588: A broad range of correspondents, though with some difficulty after 1648 due to the five-year Fronde in France. Visiting Paris in 1655, Huygens called on Ismael Boulliau to introduce himself, who took him to see Claude Mylon . The Parisian group of savants that had gathered around Mersenne held together into the 1650s, and Mylon, who had assumed the secretarial role, took some trouble to keep Huygens in touch. Through Pierre de Carcavi Huygens corresponded in 1656 with Pierre de Fermat, whom he admired greatly. The experience

516-472: A career. Huygens generally wrote in French or Latin. In 1646, while still a college student at Leiden, he began a correspondence with his father's friend, Marin Mersenne , who died soon afterwards in 1648. Mersenne wrote to Constantijn on his son's talent for mathematics, and flatteringly compared him to Archimedes on 3 January 1647. The letters show Huygens's early interest in mathematics. In October 1646 there

602-424: A distance . In common with Robert Boyle and Jacques Rohault , Huygens advocated an experimentally oriented, mechanical natural philosophy during his Paris years. Already in his first visit to England in 1661, Huygens had learnt about Boyle's air pump experiments during a meeting at Gresham College . Shortly afterwards, he reevaluated Boyle's experimental design and developed a series of experiments meant to test

688-927: A friend made in London in 1622. After a couple of years as a widower, Huygens bought a piece of land in Voorburg and commissioned the building of Hofwijck . Hofwijck was inaugurated in 1642 in the company of friends and relatives. Here Huygens hoped to escape the stress at court in The Hague, forming his own "court", indicated by the name of the house which has a double meaning: Hof (=Court or courtyard) Wijck (=avoid or township). In that same year, his brother Maurits died. Due to his grief Huygens wrote little Dutch poetry, but he continued to write epigrams in Latin. Shortly afterwards, he began writing Dutch pun poems, which are very playful by nature. In 1644 and 1645 Huygens began more serious work. As

774-621: A glimpse of the latter stages of his life. Huygens started a successful career despite his grief over the death of his wife (1638). In 1630 he was appointed to the Council and Exchequer, managing the estate of the Orange family . This job provided him with an income of about 1000 florins a year. In that same year he bought the heerlijkheid Zuilichem and became known as Lord of Zuilichem (in Dutch: Heer van Zuilichem). In 1632, Louis XIII of France -

860-562: A larger audience until the publication of De Motu Corporum ex Percussione ( Concerning the motion of colliding bodies ) in 1703. In addition to his mathematical and mechanical works, Huygens made important scientific discoveries: he was the first to identify Titan as one of Saturn's moons in 1655, invented the pendulum clock in 1657, and explained Saturn's strange appearance as due to a ring in 1659; all these discoveries brought him fame across Europe. On 3 May 1661, Huygens, together with astronomer Thomas Streete and Richard Reeve, observed

946-423: A manuscript in the manner of Archimedes's On Floating Bodies entitled De Iis quae Liquido Supernatant ( About parts floating above liquids ). It was written around 1650 and was made up of three books. Although he sent the completed work to Frans van Schooten for feedback, in the end Huygens chose not to publish it, and at one point suggested it be burned. Some of the results found here were not rediscovered until

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1032-507: A new hypothesis. It proved a yearslong process that brought to the surface a number of experimental and theoretical issues, and which ended around the time he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Despite the replication of results of Boyle's experiments trailing off messily, Huygens came to accept Boyle's view of the void against the Cartesian denial of it. Newton's influence on John Locke

1118-570: A new year's present for Leonore Hellemans, he composed the Heilige Daghen , a series of sonnets on the Christian holidays. In 1644, a garlanded portrait of Huygens was painted by Daniel Seghers and Jan Cossiers : it is now in the Mauritshuis . In 1647 he published another work, in which play and seriousness are united, Ooghentroost , addressed to Lucretia of Trello, who was losing her sight and who

1204-508: A number of Huygens' musical creations, Pathodia sacra et profana , was published in Paris. It contained vocal compositions in Latin (Psalms), French, and Italian (secular texts). The work was dedicated to Utricia Ogle, a niece of an English diplomat. In 1648 Huygens wrote Twee ongepaerde handen for harpsichord. This work was dedicated to Marietje Casembroot, a twenty-five-year-old harpsichord player, with whom he shared his love of music. In 1657

1290-548: A poetic exchange with Hooft also starts. Both would always try to exceed the other. In October of that year Huygens sent Jacob Cats a large poem in Dutch, entitled 't Voorhout , about a woodland near the Hague. In December he started writing 't Kostelick Mal , a satirical treatment of the nonsense of the current vogue. In 1623, Huygens wrote his Printen , a description of several characteristics of people. This satirical, moralising work

1376-616: A substantial portion of the work, suggesting a close collaboration between husband and wife. The couple had five children: in 1628 their first son, Constantijn Jr. , in 1629 Christiaan , in 1631 Lodewijk and in 1633 Philips. In 1637 their daughter Suzanna was born; shortly after her birth their mother died. In 1645, his sons Constantijn Jr. and Christiaan began their studies in Leiden. In these years Prince Frederick Henry of Orange , Huygens' confidante and protector, became increasingly ill, and died in 1647. The new stadtholder , William II of Orange , greatly appreciated Huygens and gave him

1462-514: A theory of curves . In 1655, Huygens began grinding lenses with his brother Constantijn to build refracting telescopes . He discovered Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, and was the first to explain Saturn's strange appearance as due to "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic." In 1662 Huygens developed what is now called the Huygenian eyepiece , a telescope with two lenses to diminish

1548-704: A vain mission to meet the French Foreign Minister Arnauld de Pomponne . Leibniz was working on a calculating machine at the time and, after a short visit to London in early 1673, he was tutored in mathematics by Huygens until 1676. An extensive correspondence ensued over the years, in which Huygens showed at first reluctance to accept the advantages of Leibniz's infinitesimal calculus . Huygens moved back to The Hague in 1681 after suffering another bout of serious depressive illness. In 1684, he published Astroscopia Compendiaria on his new tubeless aerial telescope . He attempted to return to France in 1685 but

1634-512: A way to build a social network. Shortly after, Maurits was called home to assist his father. Constantijn finished his studies in 1617 and returned home. This was followed by six weeks of training with Antonis de Hubert, a lawyer in Zierikzee . De Hubert was committed to the study of language and writing, having held consultations with Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft , Laurens Reael and Joost van den Vondel concerning language and orthography in 1623. In

1720-564: A year and two months in February 1623. There was yet another trip to England in 1624. He is often considered a member of what is known as the Muiderkring , a group of leading intellectuals gathered around the poet Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft , who met regularly at the castle of Muiden near Amsterdam . In 1619 Constantijn came into contact with Anna Roemers Visscher and with Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft. Huygens exchanged many poems with Anna. In 1621

1806-457: Is at a minimum. Huygens uses this theorem to arrive at original solutions for the stability of floating cones , parallelepipeds , and cylinders , in some cases through a full cycle of rotation. His approach was thus equivalent to the principle of virtual work . Huygens was also the first to recognize that, for these homogeneous solids, their specific weight and their aspect ratio are the essentials parameters of hydrostatic stability . Huygens

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1892-604: Is dated 1657 and can be seen at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden . Halen Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.151 via cp1112 cp1112, Varnish XID 391321418 Upstream caches: cp1112 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Fri, 29 Nov 2024 05:36:18 GMT Constantijn Huygens Constantijn Huygens

1978-540: Is known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle . Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1657, which he patented the same year. His horological research resulted in an extensive analysis of the pendulum in Horologium Oscillatorium (1673), regarded as one of the most important 17th century works on mechanics. While it contains descriptions of clock designs, most of the book is an analysis of pendular motion and

2064-438: Is striking that Christiaan senior imparted the "modern" system of 7 note names to the boys, instead of the traditional, but much more complicated hexachord system. Two years later the first lessons on the viol started, followed by the lute and the harpsichord. Constantijn showed a particular acumen for the lute. At the age of eleven he was already asked to play for ensembles, and later—during his diplomatic travels—his lute playing

2150-478: Is the suspension bridge and the demonstration that a hanging chain is not a parabola , as Galileo thought. Huygens would later label that curve the catenaria ( catenary ) in 1690 while corresponding with Gottfried Leibniz . In the next two years (1647–48), Huygens's letters to Mersenne covered various topics, including a mathematical proof of the law of free fall , the claim by Grégoire de Saint-Vincent of circle quadrature , which Huygens showed to be wrong,

2236-463: The Mauritshuis , around the same time and using the same architect, Huygens' friend Jacob van Campen . Aside from his membership in the Muiderkring (which was not as formerly supposed, an official club), at the start of the 1630s he was also in touch with René Descartes , with Rembrandt , and the painter Jan Lievens . He became friends with John Donne , and translated his poems into Dutch. He

2322-570: The Mengelingh (a section of serious poems written after 1657) and seven books with snel-dichten (quick poems). As he was older now, Huygens found refuge in music. He wrote around 769 compositions during his lifetime. Constantijn Huygens died in The Hague on Good Friday, 28 March 1687 at the age of 90. A week later he was buried in the Grote Kerk in the Hague. His son, the scientist Christiaan Huygens

2408-465: The Royal Society of London elected Huygens a Fellow in 1663, making him its first foreign member when he was just 34 years old. The Montmor Academy , started in the mid-1650s, was the form the old Mersenne circle took after his death. Huygens took part in its debates and supported those favouring experimental demonstration as a check on amateurish attitudes. He visited Paris a third time in 1663; when

2494-475: The Scientific Revolution . In physics, Huygens made seminal contributions to optics and mechanics , while as an astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and discovered its largest moon, Titan . As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock , the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain

2580-518: The Second Anglo-Dutch War , was guarded. The war ended in 1667, and Huygens announced his results to the Royal Society in 1668. He later published them in the Journal des Sçavans in 1669. In 1659 Huygens found the constant of gravitational acceleration and stated what is now known as the second of Newton's laws of motion in quadratic form. He derived geometrically the now standard formula for

2666-404: The a priori attitude of Descartes, but neither would he accept aspects of gravitational attractions that were not attributable in principle to contact between particles. The approach used by Huygens also missed some central notions of mathematical physics, which were not lost on others. In his work on pendulums Huygens came very close to the theory of simple harmonic motion ; the topic, however,

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2752-473: The centre of gravity of the system remains the same in velocity and direction, which Huygens called the conservation of "quantity of movement" . While others at the time were studying impact, Huygens's theory of collisions was more general. These results became the main reference point and the focus for further debates through correspondence and in a short article in Journal des Sçavans but would remain unknown to

2838-479: The centrifugal force in his work De vi Centrifuga , a decade before Newton . In optics, he is best known for his wave theory of light , which he described in his Traité de la Lumière (1690). His theory of light was initially rejected in favour of Newton's corpuscular theory of light , until Augustin-Jean Fresnel adapted Huygens's principle to give a complete explanation of the rectilinear propagation and diffraction effects of light in 1821. Today this principle

2924-401: The centrifugal force , exerted on an object when viewed in a rotating frame of reference , for instance when driving around a curve. In modern notation: with m the mass of the object, ω the angular velocity , and r the radius . Huygens collected his results in a treatise under the title De vi Centrifuga , unpublished until 1703, where the kinematics of free fall were used to produce

3010-409: The problem of points . Huygens took from Pascal the concepts of a "fair game" and equitable contract (i.e., equal division when the chances are equal), and extended the argument to set up a non-standard theory of expected values. His success in applying algebra to the realm of chance, which hitherto seemed inaccessible to mathematicians, demonstrated the power of combining Euclidean synthetic proofs with

3096-447: The revocation of the Edict of Nantes precluded this move. His father died in 1687, and he inherited Hofwijck, which he made his home the following year. On his third visit to England, Huygens met Isaac Newton in person on 12 June 1689. They spoke about Iceland spar , and subsequently corresponded about resisted motion. Huygens returned to mathematical topics in his last years and observed

3182-529: The Øresund to visit Descartes in Stockholm . This did not happen as Descartes had died in the interim. Although his father Constantijn had wished his son Christiaan to be a diplomat, circumstances kept him from becoming so. The First Stadtholderless Period that began in 1650 meant that the House of Orange was no longer in power, removing Constantijn's influence. Further, he realized that his son had no interest in such

3268-443: The "new Archimedes ." At sixteen years of age, Constantijn sent Huygens to study law and mathematics at Leiden University , where he studied from May 1645 to March 1647. Frans van Schooten was an academic at Leiden from 1646, and became a private tutor to Huygens and his elder brother, Constantijn Jr., replacing Stampioen on the advice of Descartes. Van Schooten brought Huygens's mathematical education up to date, introducing him to

3354-676: The 1930s. The pendulum clock was much more accurate than the existing verge and foliot clocks and was immediately popular, quickly spreading over Europe. Clocks prior to this would lose about 15 minutes per day, whereas Huygens's clock would lose about 15 seconds per day. Although Huygens patented and contracted the construction of his clock designs to Salomon Coster in The Hague, he did not make much money from his invention. Pierre Séguier refused him any French rights, while Simon Douw in Rotterdam and Ahasuerus Fromanteel in London copied his design in 1658. The oldest known Huygens-style pendulum clock

3440-572: The English lecturer John Pell . His time in Breda ended around the time when his brother Lodewijk, who was enrolled at the school, duelled with another student. Huygens left Breda after completing his studies in August 1649 and had a stint as a diplomat on a mission with Henry, Duke of Nassau . It took him to Bentheim , then Flensburg . He took off for Denmark, visited Copenhagen and Helsingør , and hoped to cross

3526-521: The French Académie was not always easy, and in 1670 Huygens, seriously ill, chose Francis Vernon to carry out a donation of his papers to the Royal Society in London, should he die. However, the aftermath of the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78), and particularly England's role in it, may have damaged his later relationship with the Royal Society. Robert Hooke , as a Royal Society representative, lacked

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3612-555: The Huygens family to win her for his brother Maurits had failed. Constantijn wrote several sonnets for her, in which he calls her Sterre (Star). They wed on 6 April 1627. Huygens describes their marriage in Dagh-werck , a description of one day. He worked on this piece, which contains almost 2000 lines, during the entire time they were married. In one of the preserved manuscripts of this work it appears Suzanna transcribed (or wrote herself)

3698-599: The Montmor Academy closed down the next year, Huygens advocated for a more Baconian program in science. Two years later, in 1666, he moved to Paris on an invitation to fill a leadership position at King Louis XIV 's new French Académie des sciences . While at the Académie in Paris, Huygens had an important patron and correspondent in Jean-Baptiste Colbert , First Minister to Louis XIV. However, his relationship with

3784-570: The Netherlands. On his return, Huygens designed the new sand road in The Hague, running through the dunes to Scheveningen . He had already planned this road in 1653, and wrote about it in his work the Zee-straet . The road was made according to Huygens' design. In 1676 the second edition of the Koren-bloemen appeared, a collected work containing 27 books. New in this edition were the Zee-straet ,

3870-659: The Spring of 1618 Constantijn found employment with Sir Dudley Carleton , the English envoy at the Court in The Hague. In the summer, he stayed in London in the house of the Dutch ambassador, Noël de Caron . During his time in London his social circle widened and he also learned to speak English. In 1620, towards the end of the Twelve Years' Truce , he travelled as a secretary of ambassador François van Aerssen to Venice , to gain support against

3956-445: The acoustical phenomenon now known as flanging in 1693. Two years later, on 8 July 1695, Huygens died in The Hague and was buried, like his father before him, in an unmarked grave at the Grote Kerk . Huygens never married. Huygens first became internationally known for his work in mathematics, publishing a number of important results that drew the attention of many European geometers. Huygens's preferred method in his published works

4042-584: The amount of dispersion . As a mathematician, Huygens developed the theory of evolutes and wrote on games of chance and the problem of points in Van Rekeningh in Spelen van Gluck , which Frans van Schooten translated and published as De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae (1657). The use of expected values by Huygens and others would later inspire Jacob Bernoulli's work on probability theory . Christiaan Huygens

4128-451: The area of that segment. He was then able to show the relationships between triangles inscribed in conic sections and the centre of gravity for those sections. By generalizing these theorems to cover all conic sections, Huygens extended classical methods to generate new results. Quadrature was a live issue in the 1650s and, through Mylon, Huygens intervened in the discussion of the mathematics of Thomas Hobbes . Persisting in trying to explain

4214-473: The areas of hyperbolas, ellipses, and circles that paralleled Archimedes's work on conic sections, particularly his Quadrature of the Parabola . The second part included a refutation to Grégoire de Saint-Vincent's claims on circle quadrature, which he had discussed with Mersenne earlier. Huygens demonstrated that the centre of gravity of a segment of any hyperbola , ellipse , or circle was directly related to

4300-493: The collected work of his Dutch poems, the Koren-bloemen appears. Some of its contents contain: Heilighe Daghen (1645), Ooghen-troost (1647), Hofwijck (1653) and Trijntje Cornelis (1653). This last work, Trijntje Cornelis , is an explosion of Huygens' creativity. It testifies to the rare language - and expressive capacity - of the author. Considering that the piece was written in a rather short time, it can be considered work of an enormous performance. Since his mother Suzanna

4386-661: The correct laws, including the conservation of the product of mass times the square of the speed for hard bodies, and the conservation of quantity of motion in one direction for all bodies. An important step was his recognition of the Galilean invariance of the problems. Huygens had worked out the laws of collision from 1652 to 1656 in a manuscript entitled De Motu Corporum ex Percussione , though his results took many years to be circulated. In 1661, he passed them on in person to William Brouncker and Christopher Wren in London. What Spinoza wrote to Henry Oldenburg about them in 1666, during

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4472-416: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Huygens first re-derives Archimedes's solutions for the stability of the sphere and the paraboloid by a clever application of Torricelli's principle (i.e., that bodies in a system move only if their centre of gravity descends). He then proves the general theorem that, for a floating body in equilibrium, the distance between its centre of gravity and its submerged portion

4558-546: The errors Hobbes had fallen into, he made an international reputation. Huygens's next publication was De Circuli Magnitudine Inventa ( New findings in the measurement of the circle ), published in 1654. In this work, Huygens was able to narrow the gap between the circumscribed and inscribed polygons found in Archimedes's Measurement of the Circle , showing that the ratio of the circumference to its diameter or pi ( π ) must lie in

4644-526: The estate of Zeelhem , but he died too in 1650. The emphasis of Huygens' activities moved more and more to his presidency of the Council of the house of Orange, which was in the hands of the young Prince inheritor, a small baby. He traveled frequently during that time, in connection with his work. There were however strong disagreements between the baby's widowed grandmother Amalia van Solms , and its widowed mother (her daughter in law) Mary, Princess Royal , (4 November 1631 – 24 December 1660, aged 29) on even

4730-519: The finesse to handle the situation in 1673. The physicist and inventor Denis Papin was an assistant to Huygens from 1671. One of their projects, which did not bear fruit directly, was the gunpowder engine . Huygens made further astronomical observations at the Académie using the observatory recently completed in 1672. He introduced Nicolaas Hartsoeker to French scientists such as Nicolas Malebranche and Giovanni Cassini in 1678. The young diplomat Leibniz met Huygens while visiting Paris in 1672 on

4816-557: The first between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, and the second between 3.1415926533 and 3.1415926538. Huygens also showed that, in the case of the hyperbola , the same approximation with parabolic segments produces a quick and simple method to calculate logarithms . He appended a collection of solutions to classical problems at the end of the work under the title Illustrium Quorundam Problematum Constructiones ( Construction of some illustrious problems ). Huygens became interested in games of chance after he visited Paris in 1655 and encountered

4902-458: The first generalized conception of force prior to Newton. The general idea for the centrifugal force, however, was published in 1673 and was a significant step in studying orbits in astronomy. It enabled the transition from Kepler's third law of planetary motion to the inverse square law of gravitation. Yet, the interpretation of Newton's work on gravitation by Huygens differed from that of Newtonians such as Roger Cotes : he did not insist on

4988-474: The first graph of a continuous distribution function under the assumption of a uniform death rate , and used it to solve problems in joint annuities . Contemporaneously, Huygens, who played the harpsichord , took an interest in Simon Stevin's theories on music; however, he showed very little concern to publish his theories on consonance , some of which were lost for centuries. For his contributions to science,

5074-430: The first idealization of a physical problem by a set of mathematical parameters , and the first mathematical and mechanistic explanation of an unobservable physical phenomenon. Huygens first identified the correct laws of elastic collision in his work De Motu Corporum ex Percussione , completed in 1656 but published posthumously in 1703. In 1659, Huygens derived geometrically the formula in classical mechanics for

5160-461: The first third of that interval. Using a technique equivalent to Richardson extrapolation , Huygens was able to shorten the inequalities used in Archimedes's method; in this case, by using the centre of the gravity of a segment of a parabola, he was able to approximate the centre of gravity of a segment of a circle, resulting in a faster and accurate approximation of the circle quadrature. From these theorems, Huygens obtained two set of values for π :

5246-578: The letters for the prince to the king, and Huygens made an excuse of the poor light. On Shrove-Tuesday they saw a masque at Whitehall presented by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple . They returned in April of that year, Huygens with the king's gift of a gold chain worth £45. In December 1621 he left with another delegation, this time with the aim of requesting support for the United Provinces, returning after

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5332-501: The magnificent collection of paintings in the Antwerp house of diamond and jewellery dealer, Gaspar Duarte (1584–1653), who was a Portuguese Jewish exile. Constantijn also had a talent for languages. He learned French , Latin and Greek , and at a later age Italian , German and English . He learned by practice, the modern way of learning techniques. Constantijn received education in maths , law and logic and he learned how to handle

5418-544: The name for christening the Dutch-English Royal newborn. In 1657, his son Philips died after a short sickness during his Grand Tour while in Prussia . In that same year Huygens became seriously ill, but healed in a miraculous manner. In 1680, Constantijn Jr. moved with his family out of the house of his father. To stop the gossiping which started shortly afterwards, Huygens wrote the poem Cluijs-werck , in which he shows

5504-549: The planet Mercury transit over the Sun using Reeve's telescope in London. Streete then debated the published record of Hevelius , a controversy mediated by Henry Oldenburg . Huygens passed to Hevelius a manuscript of Jeremiah Horrocks on the transit of Venus in 1639 , printed for the first time in 1662. In that same year, Sir Robert Moray sent Huygens John Graunt 's life table , and shortly after Huygens and his brother Lodewijk dabbled on life expectancy . Huygens eventually created

5590-562: The protector of the famous exiled jurist Hugo Grotius - appointed him as Knight of the Order of Saint-Michel . In 1643 Huygens was granted the honor of displaying a golden lily on a blue field in his coat of arms. In 1634 Huygens received from Prince Frederick Henry a piece of property in The Hague on the north side of the Binnenhof . The land was near the property of a good friend of Huygens, Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen , who built his house,

5676-457: The rectification of the ellipse, projectiles, and the vibrating string . Some of Mersenne's concerns at the time, such as the cycloid (he sent Huygens Torricelli 's treatise on the curve), the centre of oscillation , and the gravitational constant , were matters Huygens only took seriously later in the 17th century. Mersenne had also written on musical theory. Huygens preferred meantone temperament ; he innovated in 31 equal temperament (which

5762-427: The symbolic reasoning found in the works of Viète and Descartes. Huygens included five challenging problems at the end of the book that became the standard test for anyone wishing to display their mathematical skill in games of chance for the next sixty years. People who worked on these problems included Abraham de Moivre , Jacob Bernoulli, Johannes Hudde , Baruch Spinoza , and Leibniz. Huygens had earlier completed

5848-631: The threat of renewed war. He was the only member of the legation who could speak Italian. In January 1621, he traveled to England as the secretary of six envoys of the United Provinces with the object of persuading James I to support the German Protestant Union . They lodged in Lombard Street and were taken by coach to Whitehall Palace to King James and then to Prince Charles at St James's Palace where they realised they had delivered

5934-438: The universe this way made the theory of collisions central to physics, as only explanations that involved matter in motion could be truly intelligible. While Huygens was influenced by the Cartesian approach, he was less doctrinaire. He studied elastic collisions in the 1650s but delayed publication for over a decade. Huygens concluded quite early that Descartes's laws for elastic collisions were largely wrong, and he formulated

6020-546: The work of Viète , Descartes, and Fermat . After two years, starting in March 1647, Huygens continued his studies at the newly founded Orange College , in Breda , where his father was a curator . Constantijn Huygens was closely involved in the new College, which lasted only to 1669; the rector was André Rivet . Christiaan Huygens lived at the home of the jurist Johann Henryk Dauber while attending college, and had mathematics classes with

6106-537: The work of Fermat, Blaise Pascal and Girard Desargues years earlier. He eventually published what was, at the time, the most coherent presentation of a mathematical approach to games of chance in De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae ( On reasoning in games of chance ). Frans van Schooten translated the original Dutch manuscript into Latin and published it in his Exercitationum Mathematicarum (1657). The work contains early game-theoretic ideas and deals in particular with

6192-450: Was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange , in addition to being a poet and a musician. He corresponded widely with intellectuals across Europe; his friends included Galileo Galilei , Marin Mersenne , and René Descartes . Christiaan was educated at home until the age of sixteen, and from a young age liked to play with miniatures of mills and other machines. From his father he received

6278-481: Was already half-blind. The poem was offered as consolation. From 1650 to 1652 Huygens wrote the poem Hofwijck in which he described the joys of living outside the city. It is thought that Huygens wrote his poetry as a testament to himself, a memento mori , because Huygens lost so many dear friends and family during this time: Hooft (1647), Barlaeus (1648), Maria Tesschelschade (1649) and Descartes (1650). He still tried to find time to publish more of his work. In 1647

6364-550: Was bittersweet and somewhat puzzling since it became clear that Fermat had dropped out of the research mainstream, and his priority claims could probably not be made good in some cases. Besides, Huygens was looking by then to apply mathematics to physics, while Fermat's concerns ran to purer topics. Like some of his contemporaries, Huygens was often slow to commit his results and discoveries to print, preferring to disseminate his work through letters instead. In his early days, his mentor Frans van Schooten provided technical feedback and

6450-588: Was born in The Hague , the second son of Christiaan Huygens (senior), secretary of the Council of State , and Susanna Hoefnagel, niece of the Antwerp painter Joris Hoefnagel . Constantijn was a gifted child. His brother Maurits and he were educated partly by their father and partly by carefully instructed governors. When he was five years old, Constantijn and his brother received their first musical education. They started with singing lessons, and they learned their notes using gold-coloured buttons on their jackets. It

6536-412: Was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague , into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens . Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. His mother, Suzanna van Baerle , died shortly after giving birth to Huygens's sister. The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637). Constantijn Huygens

6622-479: Was cautious for the sake of his reputation. Between 1651 and 1657, Huygens published a number of works that showed his talent for mathematics and his mastery of classical and analytical geometry , increasing his reach and reputation among mathematicians. Around the same time, Huygens began to question Descartes's laws of collision , which were largely wrong, deriving the correct laws algebraically and later by way of geometry. He showed that, for any system of bodies,

6708-557: Was covered fully for the first time by Newton in Book II of the Principia Mathematica (1687). In 1678 Leibniz picked out of Huygens's work on collisions the idea of conservation law that Huygens had left implicit. In 1657, inspired by earlier research into pendulums as regulating mechanisms, Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which was a breakthrough in timekeeping and became the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years until

6794-425: Was from Antwerp , he visited there often and Trijntje Cornelis takes place in Antwerp. In 1660 his daughter Suzanna married her cousin, Philips Doublet, son of Huygens' sister Geertruijd. In 1661, a grandfather by now, Huygens was sent to France by the circle of tutors of William III, to recover possession of the county of Orange. The county was returned to the family of Orange-Nassau in 1665 and Huygens returned to

6880-560: Was in demand; he was asked to play at the Danish Court and for James I of England , although they were not known for their musical patronage. In later years he also learnt the more modern guitar. In 1647 he published in Paris his Pathodia sacra et profana with his compositions of airs de cour in French, madrigals in Italian and Psalms in Latin. They were also schooled in art through their parents' art collection, but also their connection to

6966-406: Was mediated by Huygens, who assured Locke that Newton's mathematics was sound, leading to Locke's acceptance of a corpuscular-mechanical physics. The general approach of the mechanical philosophers was to postulate theories of the kind now called "contact action." Huygens adopted this method but not without seeing its limitations, while Leibniz, his student in Paris, later abandoned it. Understanding

7052-504: Was not itself a new idea but known to Francisco de Salinas ), using logarithms to investigate it further and show its close relation to the meantone system. In 1654, Huygens returned to his father's house in The Hague and was able to devote himself entirely to research. The family had another house, not far away at Hofwijck , and he spent time there during the summer. Despite being very active, his scholarly life did not allow him to escape bouts of depression. Subsequently, Huygens developed

7138-445: Was one of the most difficult of Huygens' poems. In the same year Maria Tesselschade and Allard Crombalch were married. For this occasion verses were written by Huygens, Hooft and Vondel. During the festival, Constantijn flirted with Machteld of Camps. As a result of this he wrote the poem Vier en Vlam . In 1625 the work Otia , or Ledige Uren , was published. This work showcased his collected poems. In 1622, when Constantijn stayed as

7224-482: Was that of Archimedes, though he made use of Descartes's analytic geometry and Fermat's infinitesimal techniques more extensively in his private notebooks. Huygens's first publication was Theoremata de Quadratura Hyperboles, Ellipsis et Circuli ( Theorems on the quadrature of the hyperbola, ellipse, and circle ), published by the Elzeviers in Leiden in 1651. The first part of the work contained theorems for computing

7310-640: Was the leading European natural philosopher between Descartes and Newton. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Huygens had no taste for grand theoretical or philosophical systems and generally avoided dealing with metaphysical issues (if pressed, he adhered to the Cartesian philosophy of his time). Instead, Huygens excelled in extending the work of his predecessors, such as Galileo, to derive solutions to unsolved physical problems that were amenable to mathematical analysis. In particular, he sought explanations that relied on contact between bodies and avoided action at

7396-677: Was unable to write poetry for months because of his anguish over his wife's death, but eventually he composed, inspired by Petrarch , the sonnet Op de dood van Sterre (On the death of Sterre), which was well received. He added the poem to his Dagh-werck , which he left unfinished: the day he has described has not ended yet, but his Sterre is already dead. After sending the unfinished work to different friends for approval, he eventually published it in 1658 as part of his Koren-bloemen . Huygens also corresponded with Margaret Croft and Elizabeth Dudley, Countess of Löwenstein , ladies in waiting to Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia , and Mary Woodhouse ,

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