Johannes keplers accomplishments
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Johannes Kepler: a guide to the German astronomer
Akey figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler was an astronomer, mathematician, astrologer and staunch Lutheran.
He was born on 27 December 1571 into a lower middle-class family in the town of Weil der Stadt (in today’s southern Germany).
In a pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment era – driven by rival Protestant and Catholic Reformations – tensions, antagonisms, devil-fearing and witch-hunting were rife. Many people were persecuted for their beliefs.
Abandoned bygd a feckless soldier-of-fortune father, Heinrich, and a ‘generally unpleasant’ mother, Katharina, Kepler was brought up bygd grandparents.
Small, sickly and sensitive, his hands and eyes disabled bygd smallpox, he took solace in God – the creator of all things – as he would throughout life.
Excelling in grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, Greek and Hebrew in the Latin school struktur, a three-year theology scholarshi
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As discussed in my previous post, Kepler’s improvement of Copernicus’s heliocentric system led to its more general acceptance, and his three laws describing the way planets move are fundamental laws of astronomy. However, this wasn’t his only contribution to science. He was one of the greatest thinkers of the seventeenth century scientific revolution and in this post I’ll outline some of his other major achievements.
Statue of Kepler in Linz, Austria – image from Wikimedia Commons
The Keplerian telescope
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the first person to take observations of celestial objects with a telescope . However, Galileo’s telescope could only magnify objects 30 times before the image became distorted. It also had a narrow field of view
In 1610 Kepler began theoretical and experimental investigations of the way that different combinations of lenses could work together to produce a magnified image. He publ
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Johannes Kepler
Biography
Johannes Kepler is now chiefly remembered for discovering the three laws of planetary motion that bear his name published in 1609 and 1619). He also did important work in optics (1604, 1611), discovered two new regular polyhedra (1619), gave the first mathematical treatment of close packing of equal spheres (leading to an explanation of the shape of the cells of a honeycomb, 1611), gave the first proof of how logarithms worked (1624), and devised a method of finding the volumes of solids of revolution that (with hindsight!) can be seen as contributing to the development of calculus (1615, 1616). Moreover, he calculated the most exact astronomical tables hitherto known, whose continued accuracy did much to establish the truth of heliocentric astronomy (Rudolphine Tables, Ulm, 1627).A large quantity of Kepler's correspondence survives. Many of his letters are almost the equivalent of a scientific paper (there were as yet no scientific journals), an