This book, written for a general readership, reviews and explains the three-body problem in historical context reaching to latest developments in computational physics and gravitation theory.

The three body problem is one of the oldest problems in science and it is most relevant even in today's physics and astronomy. The long history of the problem from Pythagoras to Hawking parallels the evolution of ideas about our physical universe, with a particular emphasis on understanding gravity and how it operates between astronomical bodies. The oldest astronomical three-body problem is...