Lagrange

Around 1750, Leonhard Euler figured out something really cool.

Who? If you’ve taken calculus, you might remember that his name is pronounced like “Oiler.” That’s how I remembered who he was a few years back.

Anyway, our boy Euler was working on solving a puzzle gravity presented. It was called the “three-body problem”, and it sought to predict the motions of three objects interacting via gravity.

Euler, known for his intellect and love of mathematical challenges, was naturally attracted to this difficult problem. Like Newton, he was deeply interested in discovering how the universe worked at a fundamental level. Besides, being able to predict where celestial bodies would be in the sky could help tremendously with navigators at sea.

Euler realized that there was a place out there in space where an object felt a perfect balance of gravitational forces between the two other (bigger) objects. This point was a bit like the eye of a hurricane, in the sense that powerful forces swirled all a…