Edmond Halley is known far and wide thanks largely to the comet bearing his name, the nature of which he predicted in 1705. While that discovery is enough to make the career of any scientist, Halley-s massive contributions to the fields of astronomy, philosophy, history, mathematics, engineering, and actuarial science - the latter of which he founded single-handedly - as a young man and eventually as Astronomer Royal are mostly overlooked. Edmond Halley: The Astronomer Royal Who Brought the Universe to Earth is a revelatory and deeply researched biography of a man whose defining achievement isn-t even the half of it.
A jack-of-all-trades when it came to scientific reasoning, an all-around academic, Renaissance man, and workaholic who couldn-t leave well enough alone, Halley was amazingly productive and prolific. He was behind some of the most groundbreaking pieces of discovery in human history: it was Halley who was the first to survey the skies and plot the stars of the sout
