Milutin Milanković

Who is Milutin Milanković?

Milutin Milanković was a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, and civil engineer best known for developing the astronomical theory of climate change now called Milankovitch cycles. Born in Dalj, in what is now Croatia, he earned his doctorate in Vienna before becoming a professor at the University of Belgrade in 1909, where he spent most of his academic career. Milanković devoted decades to calculating, entirely by hand, the long-term variations in Earth's orbital eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession, and how these cyclical changes affect the amount of solar radiation received at different latitudes over tens of thousands of years, linking them to the timing of ice ages. His work, published mainly in the 1920s and 1930s and refined in his major treatise "Canon of Insolation and the Ice-Age Problem" (1941), was largely ignored for decades but was later confirmed by deep-sea sediment core data in the 1970s, becoming a cornerstone of modern paleoclimatology. Milanković was interned briefly during World War I as an Austro-Hungarian reserve officer and later a Serbian civilian, but continued his calculations even during that period. He remains one of Serbia's most significant contributors to earth science.

Sources: Milutin Milanković, Kanon der Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das Eiszeitenproblem (Canon of Insolation, 1941) · Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Milutin Milanković biography archive · James Croll Croll-Milankovitch cycle literature, Quaternary Science Reviews retrospectives