Christiaan Huygens Facts
Christiaan Huygens Facts
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| Interesting Christiaan Huygens Facts: |
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| Huygens was the second oldest son out of five children of Constantijn Huygens and Suzanna van Baerle. |
| His father was a wealthy Dutch poet and musician. |
| Huygens's father was friends with many great scientists like Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and René Descartes. |
| He published about 21 works. |
| Huygens was educated at home by his father until he was sixteen-years-old where he got a formal education. His father gave him a very liberal education. |
| When he was in college he showed a great interest and great potential for mathematics, so much so that his teachers compared him to Archimedes. His father worked at the college where he went to school. |
| Huygens was a one of the leading scientists of his time. |
| The first work he published was Theoremata de quadratura which he published in 1651. |
| In 1655 Huygens used a telescope he created himself to view Saturn, and discovered Titan, one of Saturn's moons. |
| In the same year he observed and sketched the Orion Nebula. He called his first sketch Systema Saturnium. |
| Huygens also discovered the interstellar nebulae and some double stars. |
| He was always slow, and reluctant to publish new works because he wanted to protect his reputation. His teachers were all like this too. |
| His work included early telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping. |
| He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance. |
| Huygens spent a lot of time studying spherical lenses so he could better understand telescopes. |
| He created many telescopes himself and used them for his own studies of space. |
| He designed more accurate clocks than were available at the time. He created the pendulum clock. The creation of pendulums was very important. |
| In 1673 he published his work on pendulums Horologium Oscillatorium sive de motu pendulorum. |
| Huygens died on July 8, 1695 at the age of sixty-six-years-old. |
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