George Darwin

George Howard Darwin (1845 to 1912) was an English mathematician and astronomer, the second son of Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood. Educated at a school in Clapham and then Trinity College, Cambridge, he was Second Wrangler and a Smith's Prizeman in 1868, was called to the Bar in 1874 and returned to Cambridge, where he became Plumian professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy in 1883. He applied mathematics to tidal action on the Sun-Earth-Moon system, studied the three-body problem for those orbits, and examined the stability of rotating fluids. Some of his conclusions, such as the Moon being pulled from a molten Earth, are now considered incorrect, but he was the first to apply mathematical techniques to the evolution of that system. He served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1899 to 1900.