Robert G. Aitken （1864- 1951）
Astronomer
Introduction
Robert G. Aiken is a famous astronomer whostudied binary stars, satellites, planets and comets. During his career as an astronomer, he discovered a total of 3,100 binary star and he also contributed a lot in the studying of the satellites.
Born in 1864, Robert suffered from a veryserious illness at a very early age. An infection in his middle ear and the lack of effective medication at the time led to a gradual loss of hearing in his ear. It was due to this loss of hearing that he did not go to school until he was nine years old. He wears hearing aids, and since the students at the schools he studied at have normal hearing, Robert doesn't need to use sign language to communicate. Despite his physical handicap, Robert still strives to learn. He attended Williams College and graduated at 1887. After graduation, he worked as a mathematics instructor at Livermore, California. Then, he became a professor if mathematics at the college of the Pacific.
In order to continue his researching in Astronomy, he began a systematic study of double stars, learning how to measure the positions of the stars and calculating their orbits. In collaboration of with W.J Hussey, which is another astronomer, he created a new catalog of binary stars. For his work in binary stars. He was awarded the prestigious Bruce Medal in 1926.
Difficulty and how to overcome
When he was young, he was sick so much that he did not start his school until 9 years old. This affected his learning opportunity quite a lot. When he went to school, he had to wear a hearing aid and read people’s lip in order tounderstand other people. Since everyone in his school could speak, he did not need to sign. Compared with other children, Robert lacked a lot of studying opportunity because of his disability in hearing.
He overcame the barrier through his own passionabout science. As he wrote in Astronomical Society of the Pacific, “every scientific investigator, worthy of the name, is an enthusiast, ready to make large sacrifices of convenience, comfor and even of health in his pursuit of the truth” .
At first his time was devoted to all kinds ofroutine work and to the observation of comets, asteroids, satellites, double
stars, and orbit computation, but double stars took an ever larger part of his time and it is as a double star astronomer—and assuredly as one of the greatest of them—that Aitken will be remembered.
