This book written for a general readership reviews and explains the three-body problem in
historical context reaching to latest developments in computational physics and gravitation
theory. The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in science and it is most relevant
even in today's physics and astronomy. The long history of the problem from Pythagoras to
Hawking parallels the evolution of ideas about our physical universe with a particular
emphasis on understanding gravity and how it operates between astronomical bodies. The oldest
astronomical three-body problem is the question how and when the moon and the sun line up with
the earth to produce eclipses. Once the universal gravitation was discovered by Newton it
became immediately a problem to understand why these three-bodies form a stable system in
spite of the pull exerted from one to the other. In fact it was a big question whether this
system is stable at all in the long run. Leading mathematiciansattacked this problem over more
than two centuries without arriving at a definite answer. The introduction of computers in the
last half-a-century has revolutionized the study now many answers have been found while new
questions about the three-body problem have sprung up. One of the most recent developments has
been in the treatment of the problem in Einstein's General Relativity the new theory of
gravitation which is an improvement on Newton's theory. Now it is possible to solve the problem
for three black holes and to test one of the most fundamental theorems of black hole physics
the no-hair theorem due to Hawking and his co-workers.
