Christiaan Huygens, Centripetal Acceleration, the Cycloid and Elastic Impact. (The New Mathematics for the Millions Book 15)

It is said that discovery favours the prepared mind. Christian Huygens was cultured, well read and had a prepared mind. He was skilled in many European languages, art, music, science, and mathematics.

His contributions to 17th century, science and mathematics, although less known than that of his contemporaries like Newton, represent a step forward in mathematics, physics and astronomy as well.

The son of a rich and famous Dutch diplomat, Christiaan benefitted from wealth and privilege, and took full advantage of the freedoms that this provided to study, travel and undertake ground breaking research in mathematics and science.

He was also the ultimate existentialist. His belief was that “the world is my country, and science is my religion.”

In this book we shall look at Huygen’s work in centripetal acceleration, on the mathematics of the cycloid and its relationship to pendulum motion, as well as his discoveries on elastic impacts, which includes the Conservation of Kinetic Energy. His reasoning on elastic impacts would evoke symmetry and frames of references and will include notions of relative motion.

In this book we will not touched on Huygens’ Wave Theory for Light. We shall leave this to a later volume of the New Mathematics for the Millions series.