Sir Isaac Newton <small>&lt;nowiki>[&lt;/nowiki> OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726<nowiki&gt;]</nowiki></small&gt; was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. His treatise "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", published in 1687, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, …

Jules Henri Poincaré was one of France's greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists, and a philosopher of science. Poincaré is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as 'The Last Universalist', since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics.

Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer who put the final capstone on mathematical astronomy by summarizing and extending the work of his predecessors in his five volume "Mécanique Céleste" (Celestial Mechanics) (1799-1825). This masterpiece translated the geometrical study of classical mechanics used by Isaac Newton to one based on calculus, known as physical mechanics. He also formulated the Laplace's equation.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange, comte de l'Empire (January 25, 1736 - April 10, 1813; b. Turin, baptised in the name of "Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia") was an Italian mathematician and astronomer who made important contributions to all fields of analysis and number theory and to classical and celestial mechanics as arguably the greatest mathematician of the 18th century. It is said that he was able to write out his papers complete without a single correction required.

Tom Charles Van Flandern (born Cleveland, Ohio, 1940) is an astronomer who specializes in celestial mechanics. He received a PhD at Yale University and worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory for 20 years. He is married to Barbara Ann Weber and the father of four children. In 1991, he founded the Meta Research organization in Washington, D. C. He has formulated an interpretation of the physics behind the standard model of gravitation, General Relativity, …

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (March 11, 1811 - September 23, 1877) was a French mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics. He worked at the Paris Observatory for most of his life.

Jean Meeus (born 1928) is a Belgian astronomer specializing in celestial mechanics. He is sometimes known as Jan Meeus. The asteroid 2213 Meeus is named after him. Jean Meeus studied mathematics at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he received the Degree of Licentiate in 1953. From then until his retirement in 1993, he was a meteorologist at Brussels Airport. His area of interest is spherical and mathematical astronomy.

Dirk Brouwer (Sep 1 1902, Rotterdam - Jan 31 1966, New Haven) was a Dutch-American astronomer. He received his Ph.D. in 1927 at Leiden University in the Netherlands and then went to Yale University. From 1941 until 1966 he was editor of the "Astronomical Journal". He specialized in celestial mechanics and wrote the textbook "Methods of Celestial Mechanics".

Edmund Taylor Whittaker (24 October1873 - 24 March1956) was an English mathematician, who contributed widely to applied mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of special functions. He had a particular interest in numerical analysis, but also worked on celestial mechanics and the history of applied mathematics and the history of physics. He was born in Southport, in Merseyside(at that time in Lancashire)

Benjamin Peirce, April 4, 1809 – October 6, 1880) was an American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for forty years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, number theory, algebra, and the philosophy of mathematics. After graduating from Harvard, he became a tutor there (1829), then was appointed professor of mathematics in 1831. He added astronomy to his portfolio in 1842, and remained as Harvard professor until his death.

Donald G. Saari (born March 1940 in Houghton, Michigan, USA) is the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California Irvine. He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1962 from Michigan Technological University, his Master of Science and PhD in Mathematics from Purdue University in 1964 and 1967, respectively. From 1968 to 2000, he served as assistant, …

Tullio Levi-Civita (March 29, 1873 - December 29, 1941) (pronounced le-vee chee-vee-tah) was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, …

Carl Ludwig Siegel was a German mathematician specialising in number theory. He was born in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1915 as a student in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Amongst his teachers were Max Planck and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, whose influence made the young Siegel abandon astronomy and turn towards number theory instead. In 1917 he was drafted into the German Army and had to interrupt his studies.

William H. (Bill) Jefferys (born 1940) is an American astronomer and a professor emeritus of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. He specialized in astrometry, celestial mechanics and astrophysics, including the kinematics and dynamics of astronomical bodies. He has also worked in the field of Bayesian statistics, particularly with astronomical applications. Jefferys was the Hubble Space Telescope Astrometry Science Team leader, …

Victor A. Brumberg is a Russian theoretical physicist active as a professor at the Institute of Applied Astronomy, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. He is noted for his work on celestial mechanics and ephemerides. Brumberg is a member of the scientific committé for projects under the IAU Commisson 4: Ephemerides.

Édouard Albert Roche was a French scientist, who is best known for his work in the field of celestial mechanics. He gave his name to the concepts of the Roche sphere, Roche limit and Roche lobe. He was born in Montpellier, and studied at the University of Montpellier, later becoming a professor at the same institution, where he served in the Faculté des Sciences starting in 1849.

François Félix Tisserand was a French astronomer. Tisserand was born at Nuits-Saint-Georges, Côte d'Or. In 1863 he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, and on leaving he went for a month as professor at the lycee at Metz. Urbain Le Verrier offered him a post in the Paris Observatory, which he entered as astronome adjoint in September 1866. In 1868 he took his doctor's degree with a thesis on Delaunay's Method, …

Yusuke Hagihara was a Japanese astronomer. Hagihara contributed to celestial mechanics and perturbation theory and wrote two lovely books on these subjects. He won the James Craig Watson Medal in 1960.

Spiru Haret was a Romanian mathematician, astronomer and politician of Armenian descent. He made a fundamental contribution to the "n"-body problem in celestial mechanics by proving that using a third degree approximation for the disturbing forces implies instability of the major axes of the orbits, and by introducing the concept of "secular perturbations" in relation to this. As a politician, during his three terms as Minister of Education, …

Édouard Benjamin Baillaud was a French astronomer. Baillaud studied at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. He worked as an assistant at the Paris Observatory beginning in 1872. Later he was director of the Toulouse Observatory from 1878 to 1907, during much of this time serving as Dean of the University of Toulouse Faculty of Science. He greatly expanded the observatory and enthusiastically supported the "Carte du Ciel" project.

Johan Oskar Backlund was a Swedish-Russian astronomer. His name is sometimes given as Jöns Oskar Backlund, however even contemporary Swedish sources give "Johan". In Russia, where he spent his entire career, he is known as Oskar Andreevich Baklund (Оскар Андреевич Баклунд). Russian sources sometimes give his dates of birth and death as April 16 1846 and August 16 1916, …

Charles Lane Poor (January 18, 1866 - September 27, 1951) was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, the son of Edward Erie Poor. He graduated from the City College of New York and received a Ph.D. in 1892 from Johns Hopkins University. Poor became an American astronomer and professor of celestial mechanics at Columbia University from 1903 to 1944, when he was named Professor Emeritus.

Thomas A. Heppenheimer (born 1947) is a major space advocate and researcher in planetary science, aerospace engineering, and celestial mechanics. His books are on the recommended reading list of the National Space Society.

Julio Garavito Armero was a Colombian astronomer. Born in Bogotá, he was a child prodigy in science and mathematics. He obtained his degrees as mathematician and civil engineer in the "Escuela Nacional de Ingeniería" (National Engineering School). In 1892 he worked as the director of the "Observatorio Astronómico Nacional" (National Astronomical Observatory).

Maurice (Moritz) Loewy was a French astronomer. Born in Mariánské Lázne, in what is now the Czech Republic, Loewy's Jewish parents moved to Vienna in 1841 to escape the antisemitism of their home town. Loewy became an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, working on celestial mechanics. However, the institutions of Austria-Hungary did not permit a Jew to advance to a senior position without renouncing his faith and embracing Catholicism.

Mary Watson Whitney (September 11, 1847 - January 20, 1921) was an American astronomer and for 22 years the head of the Vassar Observatory. Whitney was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1847. She went to school in Waltham and graduated from the public high school in 1863. Afterwards she entered Vassar College, where she met the astronomer Maria Mitchell. She got her degree in 1868 and returned to Waltham to care for her widowed mother.

Erich Kähler was a German mathematician with wide-ranging geometrical interests. Kähler was born in Leipzig, and studied there. He received his Ph.D. in 1928 from the University of Leipzig. He held professorial positions in Königsberg, Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg. Later in life he became interested in general philosophical issues.

Francesco Paolo Cantelli (1875-1966) was an Italian mathematician. He was the founder of the "Istituto Italiano degli Attuari" for the applications of mathematics and probability to economics. His early papers were on problems in astronomy and celestial mechanics. The later work was all on probability and it is in this field where his name graces the Borel-Cantelli Lemma.

Dr. Krafft Arnold Ehricke (March 24, 1917 - December 11, 1984), was a rocket-propulsion engineer. Born in Berlin, Ehricke believed in space travel from a very young age, influenced by his viewing of the Fritz Lang film "Woman in the Moon". At the age of 12, he formed his own rocket society. He attended Berlin Technical University and studied celestial mechanics and nuclear physics under such luminaries as Hans Geiger and Werner Heisenberg, …

Miguel Itzigsohn was an Argentinian astronomer. He discovered a number of asteroids, and also studied comets. He was a department director at the Observatorio Astronómico de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, specializing in astrometry and celestial mechanics, from 1955 to 1972.

Michael R. Douglas is a world wide leading string theorist and the director of the New High Energy Theory Center at Rutgers University. He is best known for the development of matrix models (the first nonperturbative formulations of string theory), for his work on noncommutative geometry in string theory, and for the development of the statistical approach to string phenomenology. He was on the team which built the Digital Orrery, …

David Perry Rubincam, Ph.D. (b. February 27,1947) is an American geophysicist with specialties in solid earth geophysics and celestial mechanics.

Svante Elis Strömgren ; Swedish-Danish astronomer. Strömgren was born in Helsingborg in Scania, received his doctorate at Lund University in 1898, becoming docent there the same year. He worked at the University of Kiel from 1901 and became Professor of Astronomy and director of the Copenhagen Observatory of the University of Copenhagen in 1907. He worked in a variety of fields but was particularly interested in theoretical astronomy and celestial mechanics, …

Philip Herbert Cowell was a British astronomer. He became second chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1896 and later became the Superintendent of HM Nautical Almanac Office during 1910-1930. He worked on celestial mechanics, and orbits of comets and minor planets in particular. He also carefully studied the discrepancy that then existed between the theory and observation of the position of the Moon.

Benjamin Jekhowsky (born 1881, died after 1953) was a Russian-Polish-French astronomer, born in Warsaw (at the time, Poland was part of the Russian empire). After 1934, he appears to have begun signing scientific articles as Benjamin de Jekhowsky. The Minor Planet Center credits his discoveries under the name "B. Jekhovsky" (with a "v"). In modern English transliteration, his name would be written as Zhekhovskii or Zhekhovsky.

Marian Albertovich Kowalski was a Polish-Russian astronomer. Sometimes his last name is given as Kovalsky or Koval'sky or Koval'skiy. In the scientific literature, his name was given as Kowalski or Kowalsky. He was born in Dobrzyń nad Wisłą (called Добжинь in Russian) in Congress Poland, Russian Empire.

Edvard Hugo von Zeipel was a Swedish astronomer. Hugo von Zeipel participated in scientific expeditions to Spitzbergen in 1898, 1901, and 1902. He worked at Stockholm Observatory from 1897 to 1900, at Pulkovo Observatory from 1901 to 1902, the observatory at Paris from 1904 to 1906, and the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory from 1911. His fields of study were celestial mechanics, astrophotography, and theoretical astrophysics.

Nikolai Dmitriyevich Moiseev (December 3(16), 1902, Perm, - December 6, 1955, Moscow) was a Soviet astronomer and expert in celestial mechanics. In 1938 he became the chairman of the department of celestial mechanics at Moscow State University and worked on this position until his death. His main works were devoted to mathematical methods of celestial calculations and theory of comet formation.

Richard F. Arenstorf is an American mathematician who worked at NASA, where he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 1966. Arenstorf retired as a full professor from Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt he specialized in celestial mechanics and analytic number theory. He provided potential proofs of the twin prime conjecture and the Hardy-Littlewood conjecture in May 2004. After finding an error in Lemma 8, however, he withdrew his paper in June 2004.

Leo Anton Karl de Ball was a German-Austrian astronomer. He is credited by the Minor Planet Center as "K. de Ball" for his (sole) asteroid discovery, however he seems to be best known as Leo de Ball. He was born at Lobberich in the Rhineland, in Germany. He studied in Bonn and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1877. He worked at observatories in Gotha and at Bothkamp, discovering the asteroid 230 Athamantis at the latter in 1882.