POINCARÉ, HENRI. - A FAMOUS PAPER ON CELESTIAL MECHANICS.

Sur L'Équilibre d'une Masse fluide animée d'un Mouvement de Rotation.

(Stockholm, F.& G. Beier), 1885. 4to. No wrappers as extracted from "Acta Mathematica", Vol. 7. Pp. 259-288. Clean and fine.

First appearance of one of Poincaré's main papers.
"Another famous paper of Poincar´we in celestial mechanics is the one he wrote in 1885 on the shape of a rotationg fluid mass submitted only to the forces of gravitation. Maclaurin had found as possible shapes some ellipsoids of revolution to which Jacobi had added other types of ellipsoids with unequal axes, and P.G. Tait and W.Thomson some annular shapes. By a penetrating analysis of the problem, Poincaré showed that still other "pyriform" shaoes exosted. One of the features of his interesting argument is that, apparently for the first time, he was confronted with the problem of minimizing a quadratic form in "infinitely" many variables."(DSB).

Order-nr.: 41897