Matthew J. Holman
Biographical Information 


photo Matthew Holman is an Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Lecturer in the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. Holman received an S.B. degree in Mathematics in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences in 1994, both from MIT. After postdoctoral positions at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, he joined the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1997 as a tenure-track civil servant and received tenure in 2001.

Holman is credited with the discovery of satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Holman, along with Jack Wisdom, developed an algorithm for the efficient and accurate numerical integration of the orbits in the solar system n-body problem. This is now the framework of nearly every solar system integration package available.

Holman, along with Norman Murray, received the 1999 Newcomb Cleveland Award, given annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the outstanding refereed publication in Science.