Julio Garavito Armero

Who was Julio Garavito Armero?

Julio Garavito Armero was a Colombian astronomer.

Born in Bogotá, he was a child prodigy in science and mathematics. He obtained his degrees as mathematician and civil engineer in the Escuela Nacional de Ingeniería. In 1892 he worked as the director of the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional. His investigative works had been published in Los Anales de Ingeniería since 1890, seven years before he took over editing the publication.

In his youth he studied at San Bartolomé high school, but in 1885 he had to interrupt his studies temporarily because of the civil wars which were affecting his home country. During the Thousand Days War, Garavito was part of a secret scientific society called El Círculo de los Nueve Puntos, where the condition for admission was to solve a problem about Euler's theorem. This group was active until Garavito's death. As an astronomer of the observatory, he did many useful scientific investigations such as calculating the latitude of Bogotá, studies about the comets which passed by the Earth between 1901 and 1910, and the 1916 solar eclipse.