#maths!

opening bid is 3000 based on my highly scientific crumpling

[Note added later: 'Dynamics of an Asteroid' isn't even bloody mentioned until Valley of Fear, but I'm not rewriting all this when we do the novels, so, enjoy]

Kim Newman (who is my main extra-canonical text for stuff about Moriarty) says asteroids do not do anything dynamic and has the Astronomer Royal dismiss the book as rubbish. That official later regrets this decision, although not for academic reasons.

Wikipedia, of all places, has an actual lead: I can't find any sources for the Moriarty connection here so it may be original research that someone has snuck in, but the anonymous scholar points out that the first half of Moriarty's career slightly resembles that of Carl Friedrich Gauss. He discovered the dwarf planet Ceres and won a chair at a very young age after this achievement:

The discovery of Ceres led Gauss to his work on a theory of the motion of planetoids disturbed by large planets, eventually published in 1809 as Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum. In the process, he so streamlined the cumbersome mathematics of 18th-century orbital prediction that his work remains a cornerstone of astronomical computation.

This is such a significant crossover of the concepts of 'legendary mathematician' and 'orbital mechanics of something that's not a planet' that I think it's at least worth noting. The story about Gauss as a small boy solving 'what is the sum of the integers 1 to 100' by doing it algorithmically has been inspirational to me since I first got my hands on a computer, as someone who is happy to sit all afternoon automating a process I could have done manually in an hour.