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

Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion Uniform Circular Motion Kepler's First Law: All planets move about the sun in an elliptical orbit with the sun at one foci. In an elliptical orbit the distance between the planet and the sun is continuously varying: Keplers Second Law: Equal Areas in Equal Times Keplers Third Law: The Harmonic law which is mathematically stated as follows: In the above P is the ...

Johannes Kepler Michael Fowler, UVa Physics Galileo and Einstein Home Page Link to Previous Lecture (Tycho Brahe) Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, a premature child. To be precise, according to his own records, the pregnancy lasted 224 days, 9 hours and 53 minutes. (This rather odd piece of information, and the quotes from Kepler's horoscopes for his family given below, I found in ...

Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler (Condensed Version: see below for links to fuller version) Michael Fowler University of Virginia Index of Lectures and Overview of the Course Link to Previous Lecture These two colorful characters made crucial contributions to our understanding of the universe - Tycho's observations were accurate enough for Kepler to discover that the planets moved in elliptic ...

Collection of sites about Kepler.

More Kepler Michael Fowler UVa Physics Galileo and Einstein Link to Previous Lecture Martian Problems Once Kepler had secured Tycho's data, he set himself the task of once and for all determining the exact orbit of Mars. A preliminary analysis showed the orbit to be very close to a circle, but the sun was not at the center of the circle---it was at a point almost one-tenth of a radius away!