| The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07. |
| |
| Huygens, Christiaan |
| |
| |
(kr s´tyän hoi´g ns) (KEY) , 1629–95, Dutch mathematician and physicist; son of Constantijn Huygens. He improved telescopic lenses and discovered (1655) a satellite of Saturn and studied the rings of Saturn. His findings were described in his Systema Saturnium (1659). He was the first to use the pendulum in clocks. He developed a wave theory of light opposed to the corpuscular theory of Newton and formulated Huygens’s principle, which holds that, concerning light waves, every point on a wave front is itself a source of new waves. In 1678 he discovered the polarization of light by double refraction in calcite. His chief work is Horologium oscillatorium (1673). | 1 | | See his Oeuvres complètes (22 vol. in 23, 1888–1950); study by A. E. Bell (1947); A. Elzinga, On a Research Program in Early Modern Physics (1972). | 2 |
| |
| | | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press. |
|
|
