Cassini, Rømer, and the velocity of light (2008)

I so rarely get to learn new words that I've never once encountered before, but this piece had one. "Prostapheresis"

Apparently it's an archaic trigonometric method for approximate multiplication and division.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosthaphaeresis

That was a genuinely enjoyable read, thanks.

As a mathematician who is still in the learning phase and intuition is lacking, thank you. This method is ingenius and makes the invention of logarithms make even more sense consequentally. HN rocks :-)

This is an interesting article about later additions to the quest to measure light's speed: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/speed-light-galilean-...

History of radio astronomy. It can't get much better than that.