Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
The dynamical evolution of a spherical star system is attractive to the theorist for two reasons. In the first place the physical problem, with some idealization, appears to have an appealing, if somewhat deceptive, simplicity; a large number of point masses, attracting each other with inverse-square gravitational forces, are assumed to move in a quasi-steady system with spherical symmetry. In the second place, the observed globular clusters appear to conform rather closely to this ideal of a spherical star system; to analyze the changes of these clusters with time, resulting from the dynamical interaction of stars with each other, is surely an important aspect of the theory of galactic evolution.