Christiaan Huygens

Born in 1629 to a prominent Dutch family, Huygens moved through mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy with a precision that turned guesswork into geometry. In 1655 he and his brother ground lenses and built telescopes; with one he spotted Titan and solved Saturn's appearance as a flat ring tilted around the planet. He patented the pendulum clock in 1657, then spent the next decade analyzing its motion in Horologium Oscillatorium (1673), a text on curves and mechanics that stood among the century's peaks. He derived the formula for centrifugal force in 1659, a decade before Newton, and in 1656…