Excerpt from The Theory of Elliptic Integrals: And the Properties of Surfaces of the Second Order
The investigations given in the following pages were made, the greater portion of them, several years ago. Some of them appeared from time to time in those periodical publications whose pages are open to discussions on subjects of this nature.
In this treatise a complete investigation has been attempted of the laws of the motion of a rigid body round a fixed point, free from the action of accelerating forces, based on the properties of surfaces of the second order, of the curves in which these surfaces intersect, and on the theory of elliptic integrals. The results which have been obtained are exact and not approximate, general and not restricted by any imposed hypothesis.
That the theory of the rotation of a rigid body round a fixed point might be made to rest on the properties of the ellipsoid, was long ago shown by Legendre, and more recently by Poinsot in his brief but elegant tract, the "Theorie nouvelle de la Rotation des Corps." Professor De Morgan very justly observes, in his great work on the Differential and Integral Calculus, "that the long, isolated, and inelegant investigations which usually fill up the chapters of works on dynamics which treat of rotatory motions might be almost entirely avoided, if the student were supposed to have that knowledge of the ellipsoid which he is supposed to have of the ellipse before he reads on the theory of gravitation." The ultimate analysis, however, or the dynamical solution of this problem, must be sought in the evaluation of those mathematical expressions known as elliptic integrals. At this point writers usually have abandoned the subject, or confined themselves to the discussion of particular hypotheses, and the deduction of approximate results.
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