The Dynamics of an Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the implacable foe of Sherlock Holmes. The only mention of it in Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories is in The Valley of Fear (written in 1914, but set in 1888) when Holmes says of Moriarty: "Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?" Participants in the "Sherlockian game", where Sherlock Holmes fans elaborate on elements within Doyle's stories, have suggested other details about The Dynamics of an Asteroid.

Related real works

In 1809, Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote a ground-breaking treatise on the dynamics of an asteroid (Ceres). However, Gauss's method was understood immediately and is still used today. Two decades before Arthur Conan Doyle's writing, the Canadian-American dynamic astronomer Simon Newcomb had published a series of books analyzing motions of planets in the solar system. The notoriously spiteful Newcomb could have been an inspiration for Professor Moriarty. An example of mathematics too abstruse to be criticized is the letters of Srinivasa Ramanujan, sent to several mathematicians at the University of Cambridge in 1913. Only one of these mathematicians, G. H. Hardy, even recognized their merit. Despite being experts in the branches of mathematics used, he and J. E. Littlewood added that many of them "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before." It has taken over a century for this work to be understood; the last sub-field (and the last problem of the last sub-field ) have been referred to as The Final Problem in explicit reference to the Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes only states that "it is said" (emphasis added) that no one in the scientific press was capable of criticizing Moriarty's work; he stops short of recognizing the claim as indisputably accurate. Similarly, when it was jocularly suggested to Arthur Eddington in 1919 that he was one of only three people in the world who understood Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, Eddington quipped that he could not think who the third person was.

Discussion of possible book contents

Doyle provided no indication of the contents of Dynamics other than its title. Speculation about its contents published by later authors includes:

Related references in media