Julio Garavito Armero
| Julio Garavito Armero | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 5, 1865 Bogota, Colombia |
| Died | March 11, 1920 (aged 55) |
| Nationality | Colombian |
| Fields | Astronomy (Celestial mechanics) |
| Institutions | |
Julio Garavito Armero (January 5, 1865 – March 11, 1920) was a Colombian astronomer.
Born in Bogotá, he was a child prodigy in science and mathematics. He obtained his degrees as mathematician and civil engineer in the Escuela Nacional de Ingeniería (National Engineering School). In 1892 he worked as the director of the (National Astronomical Observatory). His investigative works had been published in Los Anales de Ingeniería (The Annals of Engineering) since 1890, seven years before he took over editing the publication.
In his youth he studied at San Bartolomé high school, but in 1885 he had to interrupt his studies temporarily because of the civil wars which were affecting his home country. During the Thousand Days War, Garavito was part of a secret scientific society called El Círculo de los Nueve Puntos (the nine-point circle), where the condition for admission was to solve a problem about Euler's theorem. This group was active until Garavito's death. As an astronomer of the observatory, he did many useful scientific investigations such as calculating the latitude of Bogotá, studies about the comets which passed by the Earth between 1901 and 1910 (such as Comet Halley), and the 1916 solar eclipse (seen in the majority of Colombia).
But perhaps the most important were his studies about celestial mechanics, which finally turned into studies about lunar fluctuations and their influence on weather, floods, polar ice, and the Earthorbital acceleration (this was corroborated later). He worked also in other areas such as optics (this work was left unfinished at his death), and economics, by which he helped the country recover from the rough civil war. With this objective, he gave lectures and conferences in economics and the human factors which affected it, such as war or overpopulation.
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