Lagrange’s essay “Recherches sur la manière de former des tables des planètes d’après les seules observations”
The memoir presented by Lagrange, which this paper examines, is usually considered as an elegant, but scarcely practicable, contribution to numerical analysis. The purpose of this study is to show the significance of the novel mathematical ideas it contains, and in particular to look at this essay from the perspective of generating function theory, for which the theoretical foundations would be laid some little time later by Laplace. This excursus of Lagrange’s does indeed proffer an abundance of...