Learning from chaos
P H Borcherds · Physics World · 1992
One of the benefits of having a desk-top computer with graphics display is that you can reproduce some of the classic results of physics in a pictorial way. Shortly after getting my first machine (an Apple II) I was modelling the two-body gravitational problem and "discovered" the law of equal areas. The two-body problem was first solved analytically by Newton and the law of equal areas goes back a century earlier to Kepler. However, the three-body gravitational problem is non-analytic (although five special cases were solved by Lagrange) and to solve it you must use perturbation theory or numerical methods.