BornSaint-Jean-sur-Tourbe, Marne, France, 27 April 1834
DiedChartres, Eure-et-Loire, France, 4 June 1921
Aimable Gaillot specialized in celestial mechanics and eliminated notable residuals in the orbits of the jovian planets; his values for the masses of these planets were the most accurate ones then available. His parents were Jean Baptiste Gaillot and Marie Catherine Gillet.
Gaillot was recruited in 1861 by Urbain Le Verrier , director of the Paris Observatory. His career was spent entirely in the Service des calculs (Bureau of computation), of which he became the head in 1873. Gaillot remained devoted to Le Verrier, even after the latter’s forced resignation (1870). In this way, he was able to complete the revision of Le Verrier’s planetary theories and was active in several geodetic campaigns.
Gaillot was appointed astronome adjoint in 1868 and astronome titulaire in 1874. When Moritz Löewy was chosen as the new director of the Paris Observatory, he called upon Gaillot to be his...
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Selected References
Baillaud, B. (1921). “Gaillot (Jean-Baptiste-Aimable).” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences 172: 1393–1394.
Lévy, Jacques R. (1972). “Gaillot, Aimable Jean-Baptiste.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Vol. 5, pp. 223–224. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Poggendorff, J. C. “Gaillot.” In Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch. Vol. 4 (1904): 473–474; Vol. 5 (1926): 407. Leipzig and Berlin.
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Grillot, S. (2014). Gaillot, Jean-Baptiste-Aimable. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_491
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