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1984
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Jacques Levy, « D'Alembert et l'astronomie », Dix-Huitième Siècle, ID : 10.3406/dhs.1984.1482
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Jacques Lévy : D'Alembert and astronomy. D'Alembert's works on astronomy, written mainly between 1744 and 1756, concern essentially celestial mechanics ; they deal with the figure of the Earth, a body's movement around its centre of gravity, and the problem of three bodies (including the Moon's motion). The main positive result obtained concerns the movement of the Earth's axis (1749) : for the first time the movement of precession was calculated rigorously, and the phenomenon of nutation, which had just been discovered by Bradley, was described with a greatly superior precision to that of experimental findings. The other problems were too complex to be solved by d'Alembert's general form of mathematical analysis ; nevertheless he provided methods and tools that were to be used later, notably by Laplace, part of whose work was founded on them.