Edmond Halley
1656-1742
Born in 1656 in Haggerston, Shoreditch, England, the astronomer, physicist, mathemetician, and meteorologist Edmond Halley was best known for computing the orbit of Halley's comet.
Halley attended St. Paul's School, then The Queen's College, Oxford. After leaving Oxford in 1676, Halley established an observatory on the island of Saint Helena, where he stayed for two years. In 1879 Halley traveled to Danzig to verify astronomer Johannes Havelius's observations. Also in 1879 he published his well-received Catalogus Stellarum Australium. Halley soon became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Halley took an interest in gravity, and in 1684 visited Isaac Newton at Cambridge, convincing the latter to write the Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (1687).
In 1698 Halley undertook an expedition on the ship Paramour to study the laws governing the variation of the compass. He published the results from this and a second voyage in General Chart of the Variation of the Compass in 1701.
Halley was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford in 1703. While there he published Synopsis Astronomia Cometicae, predicting the return of a particular comet in 1758. That comet was later named after him.
In 1720 Halley became the second Astronomer Royal, a position he maintained until his death in 1742.
In addition to his work on Halley's comet and the variations of the compass, Halley propagated the idea of a hollow earth with a solid core; came up with a method to measure the distance between the earth and the sun; discovered the proper motion of the "fixed" stars; and participated in the first attempt to scientifically date Stonehenge. He also invented a diving bell, which he tested in the Thames River.
Alan Cook, ‘Halley, Edmond (1656–1742)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2012 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12011, accessed 23 Oct 2014]