The Dynamics of an Asteroid

The Dynamics of an Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the implacable foe of Sherlock Holmes.

[3] 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.

[5] 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 the jury (Weirstrass, Mittag-Leffler, and Hermite, all top-notch mathematicians) and the author himself missed a fatal error in the submission (later corrected).

Holmes only states that "it is said" (emphasis added) that no one in the scientific press was capable of criticizing Moriarty's work; he stops short of recognizing the claim as indisputably accurate.