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. Descartes was later impressed by his skills in geometry, as was Mersenne, who christened him "the new Archimedes." Student years Īt sixteen years of age, Constantijn sent Huygens to study law and mathematics at Leiden University, where he studied from May 1645 to March 1647. In 1644, Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz Stampioen, who assigned the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. From his father he received a liberal education, studying languages, music, history, geography, mathematics, logic, and rhetoric, alongside dancing, fencing and horse riding. 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.
He corresponded widely with intellectuals across Europe his friends included Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and René Descartes. Ĭonstantijn Huygens was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange, in addition to being a poet and a musician.
The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637). His mother, Suzanna van Baerle, died shortly after giving birth to Huygens's sister. Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. Mauritshuis, The Hague.Ĭhristiaan Huygens was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague, into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens. Portrait of Constantijn (centre) and his five children (Christiaan, top right). The use of expectation values by Huygens and others would later inspire Jacob Bernoulli's work on probability theory. Īs 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). 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 the amount of dispersion. In 1655, Huygens began grinding lenses with his brother Constantijn to build refracting telescopes. While it contains descriptions of clock designs, most of the book is an analysis of pendular motion and a theory of curves. 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. Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1657, which he patented the same year. Today this principle is known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle. His theory of light was initially rejected in favour of Newton's corpuscular theory of light, until Augustin-Jean Fresnel adopted Huygens's principle to give a complete explanation of the rectilinear propagation and diffraction effects of light in 1821. In optics, he is best known for his wave theory of light, which he described in his Traité de la Lumière (1690). In 1659, Huygens derived geometrically the formula in classical mechanics for the centrifugal force in his work De vi Centrifuga, a decade before Newton. 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. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain 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. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. 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. Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, FRS ( / ˈ h aɪ ɡ ən z/ HY-gənz, US: / ˈ h ɔɪ ɡ ən z/ HOY-gənz, Dutch: ( listen) 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 the Scientific Revolution.
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