Abstract:

Newton’s gravitational law and its derived Kapler’s laws are the first triumph of science that confirms a purely human’s invention of mathematics, is able to describe observations in nature. For the past three centuries, the frontier of science has moved to almost all areas, yet some basic problem in celestial mechanics has remained unsolved.

The famous three-body problem, originating from the Sun-Earth-Moon system under the Newtonian gravitation field, is particularly attractive and enormous complexity. Thanks to the advance of computational techniques, some breakthroughs begin to emerge: a figure-eight orbit was discovered numerically by Moore in 1993, and 13 new distinct periodic orbits are found byˇSuvakov and Dmitraˇsinovi?c in 2013, when three masses are equal with zero angular momentum. In 2017, Li and Liao, reported a further major advance: 695 periodic orbits with equal masses and 1223 periodic orbits found later with unequal masses.

Recently, Bohua Sun [Sci China Phys Mech Astron 2018; 61:054721] proposed a relation for Kepler’s third law of 3-body and an n-body system from the perspective of dimensional analysis and symmetry constraint of Newton’s gravitational law.

Short-biography:

孙博华教授是南非科学院院士，南非开普半岛科技大学机械系应用力学终身正教授、校务委员会委员(Senate)，力学、智能结构和微系统研究所所长。他1983年毕业于中国西安公路学院工程力学专业（现为长安大学），1986年在西安冶金建筑学院结构力学专业（现为西安建筑科技大学）获得硕士学位，1989年在兰州大学获得博士学位，并在清华大学完成二年博士后研究。1991年，他作为研究员留学荷兰TUDelft，1992年以洪堡学者身份在德国Bochum大学从事研究，1993年被邀请到开普敦大学做研究工作。孙博华教授在应用力学、智能复合结构和微机电系统等领域造诣很深，特别是在壳体理论、智能压电驱动器，微机电陀螺芯片上成就显著，曾先后发表近百篇有影响力的学术论文，另外还参与编著三部英文专著。