Halley, Edmond
Halley, Edmond (1656–1742). Astronomer, remembered because his name is attached to a comet. Leaving Queen's College, Oxford, without a degree in 1676, he went to St Helena to map the southern stars. After a famous meeting with Wren and Hooke, he visited Newton in Cambridge, and hearing about his work on gravitation, persuaded him to publish it; he was thus the catalyst making the Principia (1687) possible, seeing it through the press and providing a financial guarantee against failure. In 1703 he became professor of astronomy at Oxford, and in 1720 astronomer-royal. He computed the orbits of several comets, and deduced that those of 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682 were periodic returns of the same body: some comets at least thus moved in vast elliptical orbits, their regularity proving how empty space must be.
David Knight
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Halley, Edmond
