The Guardian recalled the forgotten genius of mathematics that laid the foundations of Newton

On an overcast day in England in 1639, 20-year-old Jeremiah Horrocks became the first person to accurately predict the transit of Venus and measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

His work proved for the first time that the Earth is not located at the center of the universe, but revolves around the sun, laying the foundation for Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work on gravity.

Today, however, Horrocks is “almost forgotten” and few people know of the important contributions he made to the field of astronomy. Due to his untimely death at the age of 22, his work was never published during his lifetime, and he was never widely recognized for his brilliant mathematical achievements.

Despite this, Horrocks’ great treatise on the transit of Venus has been lost almost forever. Only the Latin manuscript survived the ravages of the Civil War and the Great Fire of London. Passed from one astronomer to another for 20 years after Horrocks’ death, it was not published until 1662 in an appendix to the Polish astronomer’s work.

Horrocks was only 20 years old when, in 1639, he made a decisive mathematical breakthrough: “He found an error in the mathematical calculations of the very famous astronomer Johannes Kepler and corrected it.

This amendment showed that the next transit of Venus would occur in a few days and would not occur again until 1761. “Horrocks was the only person who knew this was going to happen.

He hastened to inform his friend and fellow amateur astronomer William Crabtree, a draper from Manchester.

“The only way to measure the distance to the Sun at that time is to fix the object between the Earth and the Sun and then triangulate.

In 1687, Newton recognized the importance of Horrocks’ observations in his Elements: Newton could not have completed his work on gravity if Horrocks had not made these observations at the time he did. Newton relied on this earlier work.”