- Forest Ray Moulton
Infobox Scientist
name = Forest Ray Moulton
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caption = Forest Ray Moulton
birth_date =April 29 ,1872
birth_place =Le Roy, Michigan
death_date =December 7 ,1952
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nationality = U.S.
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field = astronomer
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alma_mater =University of Chicago
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Forest Ray Moulton (April 29 ,1872 –December 7 ,1952 ) was a U.S. astronomer [Citation
id =PMID :13056607
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13056607
publication-date=1953 May 22
year=1953
title=FOREST Ray Moulton: 1872-1952.
volume=117
issue=3047
periodical=Science
pages=545-6] .He was born in
Le Roy, Michigan , and was educated atAlbion College . After graduating in1894 (A.B.), he performed his graduate studies at theUniversity of Chicago and gained a Ph.D. in 1899. At the University of Chicago he was associate in astronomy (1898-1900), instructor (1900-03), assistant professor (1903-08), associate professor (1908-12), andprofessor after 1912. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_International_Encyclopedia]He is noted for being a proponent, along with Thomas Chamberlin, of the hypothesis that planetismals had coallesced to form the
solar system . Their hypothesis called for the close passage of another star to trigger this condensation, a concept that has since fallen out of favor.In the first decades of the
twentieth century , some additional small satellites were discovered to be in orbit aroundJupiter . Dr. Moulton proposed that these were actually gravitationally-captured planetismals. This theory has become well-accepted among astronomers.The Moulton crater on the
Moon , the Adams-Moulton methods for solving differential equations and theMoulton plane in geometry are named after him.Writings
He became an associate editor of the "
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society " in 1907 and a research associate of the Carnegie Institution in 1908. Besides various contributions to mathematical and astronomical journals he was the author of:
* "An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics" (1902; second revised edition, 1914)
* "An Introduction to Astronomy" (1905)
* "Descriptive Astronomy" (1912)
* "Periodic Orbits" (1913)
* "Differential Equations" (1930)References
External links
*
Obituaries
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/JRASC/0047//0000084.000.html JRASC 47 (1954) 84]
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/PASP./0065//0000060.000.html PASP 65 (1954) 60]
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