Abstract
Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier was born on 11 March 1811 in Saint-Lô (Manche). His father, Louis-Baptiste Le Verrier, was an estates manager, born in Carentan. His mother, Marie-Jeanne-Josephine-Paulie de Baudre, was born in Baudre. Carentan and Baudre are two communities close to Saint-Lô; the grandparents of Le Verrier were also born in the region. The house in which he was born (Fig. 1.1) was a quite modest bourgeois home, attesting to their limited means.
The most comprehensive text on the youth and first works of Le Verrier is °Bertrand J. (1880).
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Notes
- 1.
From the birth certificate of Le Verrier, reproduced in Centenaire de la naissance de U.-J.-J. Le Verrier(1911).
- 2.
A summary of the life of Le Verrier, placed in the context of the time, is to be found as Appendix 1.
- 3.
Annales de Chimie et de Physique 60 (1835) pp. 174–194; 65 (1837) pp. 18–35.
- 4.
Le Verrier Lucile (1994).
- 5.
Letter cited by °Bertrand J. (1880).
- 6.
Le Verrier had later another relationship with Chasles concerning an affair of fake manuscripts, see later Chap. 6.
- 7.
Discourse at the funerals of Le Verrier, 25 september 1877.
- 8.
Poisson S.-D. Connaissance des temps for 1831, additions, pp. 23–48.
- 9.
Marie-Charles Théodore de Damoiseau in France and Giovanni Plana in Italy made similar studies concerning the motion of the Moon.
- 10.
*CRAS 9 (1839) pp. 370–372.
- 11.
- 12.
See C. Wilson (2001) Celestial Mechanics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics 4 vol., IOP Publications, London, Vol. 1 pp. 276–282. A clear and simple account (in French) can be found in *Tisserand and Andoyer (1912), pp. 267–279 ; this text dates from 1885 and still ignores the difficulties raised by Henri Poincaré concerning long-term stability of the Solar system.
- 13.
See Lequeux (2008) for a detailed scientific biography.
- 14.
- 15.
Reproduced in Centenaire de la naissance de U.-J.-J. Le Verrier (1911) p. 10.
- 16.
*CRAS 16 (1843) pp. 1054–1065.
- 17.
*CRAS 14 (1841) pp. 371–373.
- 18.
*CRAS 14 (1841) p. 406.
- 19.
*CRAS 14 (1841) pp. 487–488, 579–582, 660–663.
- 20.
Le Verrier’s work on Mercury culminates in a long paper entitled Théorie du mouvement de Mercure printed in 1845 in Connaissance des temps for 1848, additions, pp. 3–165.
- 21.
*CRAS 16 (1843) p. 1435.
- 22.
*CRAS 18 (1844) pp. 826–827 and 19 (1844) pp. 559–560.
- 23.
Tisserand F. (1880).
- 24.
An obituary of Faye by Charles Nordmann, in French, can be found in *Revue générale des Sciences pures et appliquées 13 (1902), pp. 897–898.
- 25.
*CRAS 19 (1844) pp. 666–670 and 982–984.
- 26.
The Dutch astronomer Jan Oort showed in 1950 that comets, which are residues of the formation of the Solar system, reside in a “belt” located at around one light-year from the Sun, from where they can be ejected by small gravitational perturbations which can send them to the inner parts of the Solar system.
- 27.
Faye, H. (1872) Draft for a discourse (not delivered) at the burial of Delaunay, Annales des Mines, 7esérie, vol. 2., accessible by http://www.annales.org/archives/x/delaunay.html, where one can also find a detailed biography of Delaunay.
- 28.
From Joseph Bertrand: see BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(3), folder AP.
References
°Bertrand, J.: Éloge historique de Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, Annales de l’Observatoire de Paris 15, 3–22 (1880)
Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, réunis par G. Bigourdan, Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire de Paris, cote 3567 (3), (4) et (6)
Le Verrier Lucile: Journal d’une jeune fille Second Empire (1866–1878). Zulma, Cadeilhan (1994)
°Tisserand, F.: Les travaux de Le Verrier. Annales de l’Observatoire de Paris 15, 23–43 (1880)
Bigourdan, G.: (1928–1932) Le Bureau des longitudes: son histoire de l’origine à ce jour, in Annuaire du Bureau des longitudes pour 1928 pp. A.1–A.72; 1929, pp. C.1–C.92; 1930 pp. A.1–A.110; 1931 pp. A.1–A.151; 1932 pp. A.1–A.91
Lequeux, J.: François Arago, un savant généreux; physique et astronomie au XIXe siècle. Les Ulis et Paris, EDP Sciences et Observatoire de Paris (2008)
*Tisserand, F., Andoyer, H.: Leçons de cosmographie, 6e éd. Armand Colin, Paris (1912)
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Lequeux, J. (2013). The Years of His Youth (1811–1845). In: Le Verrier—Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 397. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5565-3_1
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