Milutin Milanković

Born in Serbia in 1879, Milanković trained as a civil engineer and spent early years designing reinforced concrete structures across the Balkans, filing patents along the way. But his mind reached further: he turned to mathematics and astronomy, eventually joining the University of Belgrade as a professor of celestial mechanics. There he calculated how shifts in Earth's orbit and tilt alter the sunlight reaching its surface — the "Canon of the Earth's Insolation" — and used that framework to explain the ice ages written into rock. He extended the method to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon, f…