Christiaan Huygens

Christaan Huygens came from a Dutch family. He was in born in The Hague, Netherlands and his date of birth April 14, 1629. He was a prominent Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher. He is known particularly as an astronomer, physicist, probabilist and horologist. Huygens was a leading natural philosopher of his time. His father Constantin Huygens had studied natural philosophy and was a diplomat. Christiaan’s father thought that he was going to gain access to the top scientific circles of the time.  Christaan had studied at Leiden University. In 1651 he published an essay in which he showed the fallacy in a system of quadrature’s proposed by Grégoire de Saint-Vincent. In 1654 Christaan decided to put all his attention to improve the telescope. With his brother he devised a new and better way of grinding and polishing lenses. As a result of these improvements he was able during the following two years, 1655 and 1656, to resolve tons of questions; for example, the nature of Saturn's appendage. His observations required some exact means of measuring time, and he was led in 1656 to invent the pendulum clock, as described in his tract Horologium, 1658. The time pieces previously in use had been balance clocks. In the year 1657, Huygens wrote a small work on the calculus of probabilities founded on the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat. Then later in 1695 on July 8^th Christaan Huygens had died.