History of Celestial Mechanics
Modern analytic celestial mechanics started over 300 years ago with Isaac Newton's Principia of 1687. The name "celestial mechanics" is more recent than that. Newton wrote that the field should be called "rational mechanics." The term "dynamics" came in a little later with Gottfried Leibniz, and over a century after Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace introduced the term "celestial mechanics." Nevertheless, prior studies addressing the problem of planetary positions are known going back perhaps 3,000 or more years, as early as the Babylonian astronomers.
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