Abstract
ALL who have taken any interest in the advance of science, more particularly in the direction of astronomy and meteorology, will hear with regret of the death of M. Hervé Faye, which sad event was announced last week. A long course of scientific industry has marked his career, and a great distance seems to separate the workers of to-day from the epoch when Faye and many others, whose names are now but a matter of history, laboured strenuously and successfully to make the paths for their successors more easy and of more rapid attainment. Nearly sixty years have passed since M. Faye first came prominently before the world as the discoverer of a comet, to which his name has always been attached, and it will serve to make us appreciate the advance accomplished in one lifetime if we recall the fact that this was the first elliptic comet the period of which was determined by calculation alone, without any assistance drawn from observations made at previous returns. Faye, at that time an assistant in the Paris Observatory, recognised the necessity of computing an elliptic orbit, but the credit of determining the first orbit of considerable eccentricity from a few days' observations belongs to Goldschmidt, who was stimulated to the task by Gauss. Then the information and the methods of the Theoria Motus had not filtered through a score of text-books and come into the hands of numberless computers, whose deftness of calculation had been whetted by the discovery of hundreds of asteroids, the orbits of which stood in need of determination.
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P., W. M. Hervé Faye . Nature 66, 277 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066277a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066277a0