This gives the dates of the major players in the development of classical mechanics, at least the ones mentioned in the course. Below some are the dates of notable publications. (Links are to wikipedia pages)
Ancients
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) and
Archimedes (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC)
Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630)
1605 Discovers his 3 laws of planetary motion around this time
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
1638 The Discourse on Two New Sciences
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)
1644 Principles of Philosophy
Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695)
1659 Discovers law of centrifugal force for circular motion
1673 Period of oscillation of a pendulum (he also observed coupled pendula - the first case of coupled oscillations)
Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)
1687 Principia Mathematica
Daniel Bernoulli (1700 - 1782)
1748 Introduced idea of potential energy
Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783)
1765 Rigid body equations
Louis Lagrange (1736 - 1813)
1788 Mécanique Analytique
Gaspard de Coriolis (1792 - 1843)
William Rowan Hamilton (1805 - 1865)
1827 Systems of Rays
1834-5 On a General Method in Dynamics
Emmy Noether
Johann Dirichlet (1805 - 1859)
Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912)
Emmy Noether (1882 - 1935)
1918 Noether's theorem
For interesting essays on the early contributors, see the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Page last modified on Wed, 01 May 2013, at 16:43 (BST)