[1] After attending the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Jacques Laskar taught secondary school from 1977 to 1980 and passed the aggregation in mathematics in 1981.
In 1989, Laskar provided evidence that the Solar System is chaotic instead of quasi-periodic as originally determined by Laplace and Lagrange.
[2] More specifically, his estimate of the maximum Lyapunov exponent measuring the exponential divergence of two nearby orbits is
Their model, unlike those used by previous researchers, took into account Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
[4] With his colleague Alexandre Correia,[5] at Astronomie et Systemes Dynamiques of Paris, he found out that the atmosphere may simply have slowed the planet down and then started it spinning the other way.