Milutin Milankovic

world famous scientist from Belgrade University

virtual exhibition

The geographer Penck, after lengthy debates, accepted Milankovic’s theory and first called Milankovic’s tables from the Mathematical Climatology ''the real cannon of secular variations of insolation of the Earth in the past 600 thousand years.''

As all his research results of climate change had not been published in a single publication, Milankovic decided to write a comprehensive work entitled Cannon of Insolation in German, as a special edition of the Serbian Royal Academy, and the decision was made on March 27th 1939 at a meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The work was 660 pages long and its printing was completed in April 1941.

In the bombing of Belgrade which followed, the printing house where his work was being printed was destroyed; fortunately all the printed sheet paper except the last remained undamaged in the printing warehouse. On May 15th 1941, two officers came to Milankovic in his residence in Profesorska kolonija and brought greetings from Professor Wolfgang Soergel from Freiburg. Milankovic gave them the only complete printed copy of the Cannon of Insolation to send to Soergel, to make certain that his work would be preserved for the future.

The printing of the final sheets was completed in autumn and Milankovic gave several more copies to young German scientists who visited him upon instructions of his colleagues.

Quotes from works 

''These causes – the changes in insolation brought about by the mutual perturbations of the planets – lie far beyond the vision of the descriptive natural sciences. It was therefore the task of the exact natural sciences to outline the above-mentioned scheme, by means of its laws ruling the universe and by its developed mathematical means… By these applications, my work, based upon exact science [was finished and] passes into the sphere of the descriptive natural sciences…  It is the hitherto missing link between celestial mechanics and geology.''

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Last change: 06/19/2009 11:53

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