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1. Oblate Spheroid

   Linked via "geophysical theory"

   Historical Context
   The mathematical description of the Earth's flattening was central to early geophysical theory. Sir Isaac Newton, in his Principia, mathematically demonstrated that the Earth, being a rotating fluid mass, must be an oblate spheroid, predicting a polar flattening of approximately $1/230$ [Citation Needed: Principia, Book III, Proposition 19].
   Later, Carl Friedrich Gauss, while developing methods for [orbital determination](/entries/orbita…