As his health was fickle, Milutin received his elementary education at home (in "the classroom without walls"), learning from his father Milan, private teachers, and from numerous relatives and friends of the family, some of whom were renowned philosophers, inventors, and poets.

After graduating and spending his obligatory year in military service, Milanković borrowed money from an uncle to pay for additional schooling at TU Wien in engineering.

Milanković continued to practice civil engineering in Vienna until 1 October 1909 when he was received an offer University of Belgrade to work as an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics that comprised three basic branches: rational, celestial mechanics, and theoretical physics.

In 1912, Milankovitch accepted the invitation of his collegemate from TU Wien and the owner of the construction company Petar Putnik to create a project for bridges on rocky shores on the future route of the Niš - Knjaževac railway, in the Timok Valley through the Nisevac Gorge.

While studying the works of the contemporaneous climatologist Julius von Hann, Milanković noticed a significant issue, which became one of the major objects of his scientific research: a mystery ice age.

His first paper was from celestial mechanics in 1910, which concerned the integrals of n-body problem, but from 1912 Milanković began to be interested in cosmic climatology or solar climate.

He began working on it in 1912, after he had realized that "most of meteorology is nothing but a collection of innumerable empirical findings, mainly numerical data, with traces of physics used to explain some of them...

[14] On 14 June 1914, Milanković married Kristina Topuzović and went on his honeymoon to his native village of Dalj in Austro-Hungary, where he heard about the Sarajevo assassination which was the cause of the July crisis.

In his literary work Through Distant Worlds and Times, he described of Venus in the following words: Here we are in the temple of Isis and Osiris, more magnificent than Schinkel himself imagined.

You are pale, dear miss, your legs are wobbly - you have completely fainted... Half unconscious, I carry you, in my arms, to our Earth...He also discussed the possibility of life on Venus.

When these most important problems of the theory were solved, and a firm foundation for further work built, Milanković finished the manuscript under the title Mathematische Grundlagen der kosmischen Strahlungslehre that he sent to his mentor Professor Czuber in Vienna at the end of 1917.

Milanković then, with the help of Professor Ivan Đaja, prepared the French text of this work and it was published under the title "Théorie mathématique des phénomènes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire" (Mathematical Theory of Heat Phenomena Produced by Solar Radiation) in 1920 in the edition of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (today HAZU) from Zagreb and the Gauthier-Villars in Paris.

Milankovitch's works on astronomical explanations of ice ages, especially his curve of insolation for the past 130,000 years, received support from the climatologist Wladimir Köppen and from the geophysicist Alfred Wegener.

Milanković spent 100 days doing the calculations and prepared a graph of solar radiation changes at geographical latitudes of 55°, 60° and 65° north for the past 650,000 years.

His solar curve was introduced in a work entitled "Climates of the geological past", published by Wladimir Köppen and his son-in-law Alfred Wegener in 1924.

That same year, Milanković asked his colleague and friend, Vojislav Mišković, to collaborate in the work and calculate astronomical values based on the Le Verrier method.

[30] After almost three years, Mišković and his staff completed the calculation of astronomical values based on the Le Verrier method and using the masses of the planets as known at that time.

Conversations with Wegener, the father of continental drift theory, got Milanković interested in the interior of the Earth and the movement of the poles, so he told his friend that he would investigate polar wandering.

In November 1929, Milanković received an invitation from Professor Beno Gutenberg of Darmstadt to collaborate on a ten volume handbook on geophysics and to publish his views on the problem of the secular variations of the Earth's rotational poles.

[37] Using vector analysis he made a mathematical model of the Earth to create a theory of secular motion of the terrestrial poles.

Milanković wrote four sections of Gutenberg's "Handbook of Geophysics" (Handbuch der Geophysik): The lecture on the apparent shift of poles was held at a congress of Balkan mathematicians in Athens in 1934.

[48][34] This tome was entitled "Canon of Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the Ice Ages", which covered his nearly three decades of research, including a large number of formulas, calculations and schemes, but also summarized universal laws through which it was possible to explain cyclical climate change – his namesake Milankovitch cycles.

After the successful occupation of Serbia on 15 May 1941, two German officers and geology students came to Milanković in his house and brought greetings from Professor Wolfgang Soergel [de] of Freiburg.

The "Canon" was issued in 1941[50] by the Royal Serbian Academy, 626 pages in quarto, and was printed in German as "Kanon der Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das Eiszeitenproblem".

In 1953, he was at the Congress of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) held in Rome where he was interrupted during his speech by numerous opponents since radiocarbon dating at that time showed different results than his theory.

At the time of Milanković's proposal, it was suspected the period of rotation of Earth might not be constant, but it was not until the development of quartz and atomic clocks beginning in the 1930s that this could be proven and quantified.

In 1965, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union named an impact crater on the far side of the Moon as Milankovic, which was later confirmed at the 14th IAU General Assembly in 1970.

Since 1993 the Milutin Milankovic Medal has been awarded by the European Geophysical Society (called the EGU since 2003) for contributions in the area of long-term climate and modeling.

At NASA, in their edition of "On the Shoulders of Giants", Milanković has been ranked among the top fifteen minds of all time in the field of earth sciences.

On behalf of five academics, Milutin Milanković wrote a recommendation that Nikola Tesla be elected a full member of the Royal Serbian Academy, which was done at a ceremonial meeting on March 7, 1937.