Nyrén, Magnus

Born Feb. 21, 1837, in Värmland, Sweden; died Jan. 16, 1921, in Stockholm. Russian astronomer. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. A Swede by birth, Nyrén graduated from the University of Uppsala (Sweden) in 1859. From 1868 to 1907 he worked at the Pulkovo Observatory. He conducted observations for the Pulkovo fundamental catalogs of the accurate positions of stars. Much of Nyrén’s work was devoted to the determination of astronomical constants, methods of analyzing observations, and the study of instrument errors. He discovered a secular variation and confirmed the periodic variation in the latitude of Pulkovo.