The Great Red Spot

Comet PanSTARRS

Gorgeous picture of Comet PanSTARRS taken by Carl Gruber on March 2, 2013 at a mountain lookout in Melbourne.

Using a shortwave radio to listen to Jupiter and the Sun. 

Սպիրու Կոստաքեի Հարեթ Spiru C. Haret

Romanian Armenian mathematician, astronomer and politician. 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. (Proved that planetary motion is not absolutely stable)  As a politician, during his three terms as Minister of Education, Haret ran deep reforms, building the modern Romanian education system. He was made a full member of the Romanian Academy in 1892. He also founded the Astronomical observatory in Bucharest, The crater Haret on the Moon is named after him. The Spiru Haret University, a private university in Bucharest, Romania, bears the name of a scientist and reformer of the Romanian education.

Born 15 February 1851 in Iaşi, Moldavia to an Armenian family, He showed talent for mathematics at a very young age, publishing two textbooks, one in algebra and one in trigonometry when he was still in high school. Whilst in his second year studying physics and mathematics the in the University of Bucharest, he became a teacher of mathematics in Nifon Seminary.

After graduation, Haret won a scholarship competition organized by Titu Maiorescu and went to Paris in order to study mathematics at the Sorbonne. There he earned a mathematics diploma in 1875 and a physics diploma in 1876. Two years later he earned his Ph.D. by defending his thesis, Sur l’invariabilité des grandes axes des orbites planétaires (On the invariability of the major axis of planetary orbits), in front of examiners led by Victor Puiseux. In this work he proved a result fundamental for the n-body problem in astronomy, the thesis being published in Vol. XVIII of the Annales de l'Observatoire de Paris. Haret was the first Romanian to obtain a Ph.D. degree in Paris, (though he was of full Armenian descent)

After his return to Romania in 1878, Haret abandoned scientific research and dedicated the rest of his life to improving Romanian education, which was heavily underdeveloped at the time, both as professor and as politician. He only published an article on the secular acceleration of the Moon in 1880 and one on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (1912). And in In 1910 he published Social mechanics, which used mathematics to explain social behaviour (somehow anticipating the fictional “psychohistory” branch of mathematics developed by Hari Seldon, the fictional character of Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation, published 40 years later).

He was appointed professor of rational mechanics at the Science Faculty in Bucharest. The next year Haret became a correspondent member of the Romanian Academy. He kept the professorship at the Science Faculty until his retirement in 1910.  As Minister of Education he ran a complete reform, basically building the modern Romanian education system

Gibbous by Abi Ashra (Tumblr)