Jean Kovalevsky
French astronomer
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(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, Jean Kovalevsky was a French astronomer, specializing in celestial mechanics. He is known as a primary initiator and a leader of the Hipparcos space experiment. Biography Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Kovalevsky was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up bilingual in Russian and French. He studied from 1951 to 1955 at the École normale supérieure graduating with the agrégation in mathematics in 1954. He held from 1955 to 1960 the positions attaché de techerche and then chargé de recherche at the Paris Observatory. He was from 1957 to 1959 a graduate student and research assistant at Yale University. In 1959 he received his doctorate at Yale from Dirk Brouwer on the movement of the 8th moon of Jupiter. From 1960 to 1971 Kovalevsjy was head of celestial mechanics at the Bureau des Longitudes. Celestial mechanics experienced a new boom in the Sputnik age and he published an introduction to the subject, which also considered the orbits of artificial satellites. At the Bureau des Longitudes he founded the Service des Calculs et de Mécanique Céleste, where he developed new calculation methods using computer algebra methods, which were constantly improved over time with his collaborators. From 1971 to 1978 he was head of the research group spatial geodesy , which was also supported by the French space agency Centre national d'études spatiales . In 1979 he and Jean Delhaye led an astronomical delegation visiting China. From 1974 to 1982 Kovalevsky was the first director of the Centre de recherches en géodynamique et astrométrie in Grasse, which in 1988 merged with the Nice Observatory to become the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur. From 1982 to 1987 he was an astronomer in CERGA, but he resigned as CERGA's director so that he could work on the data analysis for the Fundamental Astronomy by Space Techniques consortium for double star data reduction. From 1987 to 1992 he was again CERGA's director. In 1994 he retired as astronomer emeritus.
