Abstract
The classical three-body problem arose in an attempt to understand the effect of the Sun on the Moon’s Keplerian orbit around the Earth. It has attracted the attention of some of the best physicists and mathematicians and led to the discovery of ‘chaos’. We survey the three-body problem in its historical context and use it to introduce several ideas and techniques that have been developed to understand classical mechanical systems.
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(Left) Govind Krishnaswami is on the faculty of the Chennai Mathematical Institute. His research concerns various problems in theoretical and mathematical physics.
(Right) Himalaya Senapati is a PhD student at the Chennai Mathematical Institute. He works on dynamical systems and chaos.
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Krishnaswami, G.S., Senapati, H. An Introduction to the Classical Three-Body Problem. Reson 24, 87–114 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-019-0760-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-019-0760-1