Celestial Mechanics

Abstract

The Karl Schwarzschild’s debut in his distinguished publishing career came with two papers on celestial mechanics, which he wrote in 1890 at the age of only 16. This shows that the time when he was working on problems of celestial mechanics was a decisive one, at least for his own scientific development. Fourteen years after these first papers, he wrote an article, the last in a series of eight papers, in which he summarized the state of celestial mechanics then and maked predictions of its future development. (We may for the moment disregard his contribution to Newcomb-Engelmann’s “Popular Astronomy”, which was written ten years later) . In the following years he became busy with one branch of astronomical science then fashionable, namely astrophysics. He wrote his papers on celestial mechanics during the period between 1890 and 1903 when he was in Frankfurt and Munich and later at the von Kuffner Observatory at Vienna.