The Dynamics of An Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the implacable foe of Sherlock Holmes. The book is described by author Arthur Conan Doyle in The Valley of Fear (written in 1914, but set in 1888) when Sherlock Holmes, speaking of Professor Moriarty, states

Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

It might seem fantastic, or at least a wild exaggeration, to ascribe to one man mathematics so advanced that the experts could not even understand it well enough to criticize it, much less invent it themselves. But this is exactly what happened in 1913 when the then unknown Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote a letter containing some of his results to G. H. Hardy. Hardy and his colleague J.E. Littlewood said of these results, “not one could have been set in the most advanced mathematical examination in the world.” Although Hardy was one of the pre-eminent mathematicians of the day and an expert in several of the fields Ramanujan wrote about, he added that many of them "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before." With this class of talent, Professor Moriarty invoked profound respect, and more than a little awe.

Professor Moriarty also wrote A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, when he was only 21 years of age. In addition to being a completely different topic, it must have been quite a bit more accessible, since it got him a position as a chair of mathematics at a local university.

Discussion of possible book contents

Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence relating to the contents of this volume. This has in no way prevented people from speculating about what it contained. Here are a few essays on this topic by some famous authors, and a list of many more references:

• "The Ultimate Crime", short story by Isaac Asimov, in "Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space", Severn House (UK), 1985. pp.339-355. ISBN 0312944004

• "The Dynamics of An Asteroid", short story by Robert Bloch, The Baker Street Journal, 1953 (Also found in Marvin Kaye (ed.), The Game Is Afoot, St Martin's Press (USA), 1994. pp.488-493 ISBN 0312117973)

• ^* Lists many references to this work, as well as other works of Moriarty, Holmes, and others.

Citation Analysis

The list above shows 42 references to Dynamics and 27 to Treatise, which we may take as a lower limit. An online search, as of 2005, for these titles with author Moriarty, reveals 263 references to Dynamics and 209 to Treatise. These are excellent numbers for any scientific paper, where the overall average is about 6 references. We can compare references in modern articles to other pre-1900 authors that are still referenced today (Article: Blast from the Past), and Moriarty ranks 12th among all physicists. This is particularly impressive given the undeniable drawbacks of these works:

• They were written well before 1888. The exact year is unknown, but by 1888 their reputation was well established.
• For Dynamics in particular, the math is so abstruse that no-one of that time could criticize it. Note that these same mathematicians had no trouble criticizing the works of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. Gauss, in particular, wrote a ground breaking treatise on the dynamics of an asteroid (1 Ceres), and it was understood immediately (and his method is still used today).
• There are no copies of these works available on line, or for sale on line. Even the best research libraries are unlikely to contain copies.

Fictional books