Clairaut, Alexis Claude (1713–1765)
French mathematician, born in Paris. He showed early on a remarkable aptitude
for mathematics and was admitted to the Academy of Sciences at the age of
only 18. Clairault wrote numerous scientific papers, but his fame rests
principally upon his Théorie de la Figure de la Terre (1743),
in which he promulgated the notion that the variation of gravity
on the surface of the Earth, regarded as an elliptic spheroid, was altogether
independent of the law of density; on his explanation of the motion of the
lunar apogee, a point left unexplained by Newton;
and on his computation of the time of the return of Halley's
Comet.
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