Christiaan Huygens

As a mathematician and physicist of the second half of the seventeenth century, Christiaan Huygens is regarded as second only to Isaac Newton. He was a central figure in the transformation of physics in that period. He followed in the footsteps of pioneers like Galileo and Descartes in attempting to understand the world purely through mathematical study and carried out pioneering theoretical research in many fields, including mathematics, mechanics, optics and astronomy. He deduced the laws of collision and was active in the fields of probability and light theory. He discovered the rings of Saturn and established that it also had a moon.