Edmond Halley

Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist, born in Haggerston in 1656. He catalogued the southern stars from Saint Helena, was made a fellow of the Royal Society at twenty-two, and edited its Philosophical Transactions. He encouraged and helped pay for the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia, and used Newton's law of gravitation to compute the orbit of the comet that now bears his name, predicting its return in 1758. In 1703 he became Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, where he completed the translation of Books V to VII of Apollonius's Conics from Arabic, and in 1720 he succeeded John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal. His early paper on a geometrical method for planetary orbits shows the mathematical side of a career best known for astronomy.