The Dynamics of an Asteroid

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.

In 1887, Henri Poincaré's submission to the celestial mechanics contest of King Oscar II of Sweden investigated the three-body problem, a theoretical basis of asteroid dynamics. It was also hard to criticize, as both the jury (Weirstrass, Mittag-Leffler, and Hermite, all top-notch mathematicians) and the author himself missed a fatal error in the submission (later corrected).

Another 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.