Arun
Last Activity: 6 Years ago
Mathematicians and astronomers figured this out about the time of Newton. It seems that this law was deduced by looking at the orbits of planets, which were stable and elliptical. There is some controversy as to who understood this first, but it seems Newton may have done the most with it, showing that the attraction to a sphere would be the same as if all its mass were concentrated at the center, and describing the paths of orbiting objects.
