 Christian
Huygens (1629-1695) was a Dutch physicist and astronomer who developed new
methods for grinding and polishing glass telescope lenses (about 1654).
With his new, powerful telescopes, he identified Saturn's rings and discovered
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn in 1655. Huygens also invented the pendulum
clock in 1656 (eliminating springs), wrote the first work on the calculus
of probability (De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, 1655), and proposed the wave
theory of light (Traité de la lumiere, 1678). |