Milutin Milanković

Milutin Milanković was a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer, university professor and academic, born in Dalj in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1879. He made two fundamental contributions to science: advanced methods to compute slow changes in Earth's orbit that redistribute insolation between the seasons and between low and high latitudes, now known as Milankovitch cycles, and a quantitative theory of climate in which these cycles were sufficient to cause the recurring ice ages of the Quaternary. He studied civil engineering at TU Wien, graduated in 1902 and successfully defended his PhD thesis on the theory of pressure curves on 3 December 1904. He was a distinguished professor of applied mathematics and celestial mechanics at the University of Belgrade, a director of the Belgrade Observatory and a vice-president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.