Jacques Cassini
French astronomer
Jacques Cassini's AcademicInfluence.com Rankings
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Physics
Jacques Cassini's Degrees
- Doctorate Astronomy Université Paris Cité
Why Is Jacques Cassini Influential?
(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, Jacques Cassini was a French astronomer, son of the famous Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. He was known as Cassini II. Cassini was born at the Paris Observatory. He was first admitted to Collège Mazarin after brief studies at his home observatory under his father. Later, he was admitted at the age of seventeen to membership of the French Academy of Sciences, he was elected in 1696 a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and became maître des comptes in 1706. While in England, he was acquainted with other famous astronomers such as Newton and Halley. Having succeeded to his father's position at the observatory in 1712, in 1713 he extended the Paris meridian, measuring the arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Perpignan, and published the results in a volume entitled Traité de la grandeur et de la figure de la terre . His two separate calculations for a degree of meridian arc were 57,097 toises de Paris and 57,061 toises , giving results for Earth's radius of 3,271,420 toises and 3,269,297 toises , respectively. This work represented Cassini's delve into the Earth figure debate. There were two main schools of thought, the Cartesians believed in a prolate spheroid, and the Newtonians in an oblate spheroid. Cassini sided with the Cartesians over the Newtonians, advocating for a prolate spheroid shaped earth. The Cartesians had support, but the Newtonians made separate observations seeming to disagree with the Cartesian idea. Cassini II likely realized that the Newtonian observations were more accurate, and stepped out of the scientific field. He only returned publicly after an attack from Anders Celsius.
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What Schools Are Affiliated With Jacques Cassini?
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