R.I.P. Sverre Aarseth (1934-2024)

I am very late passing this sad news on, but I only just heard of the death (on 28th December 2024, at the age of 90) of Sverre Aarseth, who spent almost all of his research career at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Sverre was a pioneer in the use of N-body numerical techniques for solving gravitational problems and whose work had enormous impact across many aspects of astrophysics and cosmology, not least because he made his codes available as “open source”. I suspect many of us have used an “Aarseth code” at some point in our careers! I only met him a few times, but he struck me as a friendly and self-effacing man. He was certainly never someone who tried to hog the limelight but he was held in a very high regard across the research community.

You can find fuller tributes here and here.

Rest in peace, Sverre Aarseth (20 July 1934 – 28 December 2024)

#NBodySimulations #RIP_ #SverreAarseth #UniversityOfCambridge

@ross Play #KerbalSpaceProgram for a while, you'll get a much better understanding of the (very counterintuitive) nature of #OrbitalDynamics :)

Oh, and how did they calculate things in the #1960s? While final trajectories were analyzed with (compute-intensive) #NBodySimulations, rough trajectories were created with "#PatchedConics", which basically sort of converts a trajectory into a #geometry problem.