Background
Jean Gaillot was born on April 27, 1834, in Saint-Jean-sur-Tourbe, Marne, France. He was the son of Jean Baptiste Gaillot and Marie Catherine Gillet.
France
Jean Baptiste Aimable Gaillot
Jean Gaillot was born on April 27, 1834, in Saint-Jean-sur-Tourbe, Marne, France. He was the son of Jean Baptiste Gaillot and Marie Catherine Gillet.
Gaillot spent his entire career at the Bureau of Computation of the Paris observatory, to which he was assigned at the time of his recruitment by Urbain Le Verrier in 1861, and was a director of the bureau from 1873. He became a chief astronomer in 1874, and was made an assistant director of the Paris observatory in 1897.
In astronomy, Gaillot concentrated on the calculations that would make his colleagues’ observations most useful. He directed the publication of the Catalogue de l’Observatoire de Paris, which classified the 387, 474 meridian observations made between 1837 and 1881. Despite poor health, Gaillot saw this twenty-year task to completion before retiring in 1903. He continued his research in celestial mechanics until he was eighty.
Gaillot was Le Verrier’s only collaborator. To complete Le Verrier’s work, Gaillot amended the latter’s analytical theories concerning Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. By using a laborious but effective method of interpolation, he eliminated all discordance: his values for the mass of these planets turned out to be excellent and the positions he calculated were confirmed by observations to an accuracy of one or two seconds. Since their publication, Gaillot’s tables have served as a basis for the international ephemerides found in Connaissance des temps.