University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rare Book Room Exhibit

Laplace's great systematization of celestial mechanics, expounding in detail the results obtained by himself and his predecessors in this field, has been called the eighteenth-century Almagest. In it he translated the substance of Newton's Principia into the language of the infinitesimal calculus, and completed it in many details.

Laplace applied his mathematical theories of probability to celestial bodies and concluded that the apparent changes in the motion of planets and their satellites are changes of long periods, and that the solar system is in all probability very stable. He gave methods for calculating the movements of translation and rotation of heavenly bodies and for resolving problems of tides, from which he deduced the mass of the moon.

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