Timeline of classical mechanics

Timeline of classical mechanics

Timeline of classical mechanics

260 BC - Archimedes mathematically works out the principle of the lever and discovers the principle of buoyancy

60 - Hero of Alexandria writes Metrica, Mechanics, and Pneumatics

1490 - Leonardo da Vinci describes capillary action

1581 - Galileo Galilei notices the timekeeping property of the pendulum

1589 - Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same acceleration

1638 - Galileo Galilei publishes Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

1658 - Christian Huygens experimentally discovers that balls placed anywhere in side an inverted cycloid reach the lowest point of the cycloid in the same time and thereby experimentally shows that the cycloid is the isochrone

1668 - John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum

1687 - Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica

1690 - James Bernoulli shows that the cycloid is the solution to the isochrone problem

1691 - Johann Bernoulli shows that a chain freely suspended from two points will form a catenary

1691 - James Bernoulli shows that the catenary curve has the lowest center of gravity that any chain hung from two fixed points can have

1696 - Johann Bernoulli shows that the cycloid is the solution to the brachistochrone problem

1714 - Brook Taylor derives the fundamental frequency of a stretched vibrating string in terms of its tension and mass per unit length by solving an ordinary differential equation

1733 - Daniel Bernoulli derives the fundamental frequency and harmonics of a hanging chain by solving an ordinary differential equation

1734 - Daniel Bernoulli solves the ordinary differental equation for the vibrations of an elastic bar clamped at one end

1738 - Daniel Bernoulli examines fluid flow in Hydrodynamica

1739 - Leonhard Euler solves the ordinary differential equation for a forced harmonic oscillator and notices the resonance phenomenon

1742 - Colin Maclaurin discovers his uniformly rotating self-gravitating spheroids

1747 - Pierre Louis Maupertuis applies minimum principles to mechanics

1759 - Leonhard Euler solves the partial differential equation for the vibration of a rectangular drum

1764 - Leonhard Euler examines the partial differential equation for the vibration of a circular drum and finds one of the Bessel function solutions

1788 - Joseph Louis Lagrange presents Lagrange's equations of motion in M�canique Analytique

1789 - Antoine Lavoisier states the law of conservation of mass

1821 - William Hamilton begins his analysis of Hamilton's characteristic function

1834 - Carl Jacobi discovers his uniformly rotating self-gravitating ellipsoids

1834 - John Russell observes a nondecaying solitary water wave (soliton) in the Union Canal near Edinburgh and uses a water tank to study the dependence of solitary water wave velocities on wave amplitude and water depth

1835 - William Hamilton states Hamilton's canonical equations of motion

1835 - Gaspard Coriolis examines motion on a spinning surface deduces the Coriolis effect

1842 - Christian Doppler examines the Doppler shift of sound

1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz formally states the law of conservation of energy

1851 - L�on Foucault shows the Earth's rotation with a huge pendulum (Foucault's pendulum)

1902 - James Jeans finds the length scale required for gravitational perturbations to grow in a static nearly homogeneous medium