Julio Garavito: Google Doodle celebrates Colombian astronomer’s 157th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 157th birthday of Colombian astronomer Julio Garavito, who is broadly viewed as one of the country’s most influential scientists, on January 5, 2022.

Who was Julio Garavito?

Julio Garavito Armero was born on January 5, 1865, in Bogotá, Colombia. He was a child prodigy in science and mathematics. He was additionally a Colombian mathematician, engineer, and astronomer.

Julio Garavito got his degrees as a mathematician and civil engineer in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (National University of Colombia). In 1892, he served as the director of the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional (National Astronomical Observatory). His analytical works had been published in Los Anales de Ingeniería (The Annals of Engineering) starting around 1890, seven years before he took over editing the publication.

In his youth, Julio Garavito learned at San Bartolomé secondary school, yet in 1885 he needed to intrude on his studies briefly as a result of the civil wars which were influencing 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, Julio Garavito did numerous helpful scientific examinations, for example, calculating the latitude of Bogotá, learns about the comets which passed by the Earth somewhere in the range of 1901 and 1910 (like Comet Halley), and the 1916 solar eclipse (found in most of Colombia).

Be that as it may, maybe the most significant were his studies about celestial mechanics, which at last transformed into studies about lunar variances and their effect on weather, floods, polar ice, and the Earth orbital acceleration (this was substantiated later).

Julio Garavito worked additionally in different regions like optics (this work was left incomplete at his death), and economics, by which he assisted the country with recuperating the rough civil war. With this objective, he gave lectures and conferences in economics and the human factors which impacted it, like war or overpopulation.

Julio Garavito was later the director of the Chorographic Commission, made with the objectives of developing the Colombian railways and defining the frontier with Venezuela. He went against Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity – presumably, he was restricting vague and contradictory opinions on this theory and its effect on classical physics. He has been contrasted with two incredible researchers of the 19th century: José Celestino Mutis and Francisco José de Caldas.

In 1970, the International Astronomical Union observed Julio Garavito’s celestial legacy by naming a crater on the far side of the moon in his honor. In 1996, the Colombian government printed his representation on the 20,000 peso note into circulation to celebrate his priceless achievements.

On January 5, 2022, Google featured a Doodle on its home page for celebrating Julio Garavito’s 157th Birthday.