See, Thomas Jefferson Jackson

Bornnear Montgomery City, Missouri, USA, 19 February 1866

DiedOakland, California, USA, 4 July 1962

American astronomer T. J. J. See is remembered, if at all, for erroneous, perhaps even fraudulent, claims for the detection of planets orbiting other stars, though others of his once wild-sounding ideas sound superficially like our modern understanding of, for instance, solar-system formation. See earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1889 and his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1892 with a thesis on the orbits and origins of visual binary stars. Upon returning to the United States, he spent 3 years at the University of Chicago. While there, he ran afoul of George Hale , the driving force behind the establishment of the Yerkes Observatory (and later those at Mount Wilson and Palomar), a circumstance that did little to advance See’s career. See spent the next 2 years in the employ of Percival Lowell , during which time the former...