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1. Carl Friedrich Gauss

   Linked via "orbital determination"

   Gauss shifted significant focus toward celestial mechanics following the discovery of the dwarf planet Ceres/) in 1801. Astronomers struggled to predict Ceres's/) orbit due to insufficient observational data. Gauss developed the method of least squares to fit the observed points to a parabolic path, successfully recalculating the true [orbi…

2. Oblate Spheroid

   Linked via "orbital determination"

   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, impl…