The Life and Times of Johannes Kepler :: Essays Papers

The Life and Times of Johannes KeplerJohannes Kepler, was a German astronomer and natural philosopher, noted for formulating and verifying the three laws of planetary motion. These laws are now cognise as Keplers laws.Johannes Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt in Swabia, in southwest Germany. From 1574 to 1576 Johannes lived with his grandparents in 1576 his parents moved to nearby Leonberg, where Johannes entered the Latin school. In 1584 he entered the Protestant seminary at Adelberg, and in 1589 he began his university education at the Protestant university of Tbingen. Here he studied theology and read widely. He passed the M.A. examination in 1591 and continued his studies as a graduate student. There he was influenced by a mathematics professor, Michael Maestlin, an adherent of the heliocentric theory of planetary motion first developed by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Kepler accepted Copernican theory immediately, believing that the simplicity of Copernican planet ary ordering must have been Gods plan. In 1594 Kepler accepted an try-on as professor of mathematics at the Protestant seminary in Graz in the Austrian province of Styria. He was also appointed district mathematician and calendar maker. For sextuplet years, Kepler taught, geometry, Virgil, arithmetic, and rhetoric. There he make watered out a complex geometric hypothesis to account for distances between the planetary orbits-orbits that he mistakenly assumed were circular. Kepler then proposed that the fair weather emits a force that diminishes inversely with distance and pushes the planets around in their orbits. Kepler published his account in a thesis entitled Mysterium Cosmographicum (Cosmographic Mystery) in 1596. This work is significant because it presented the first comprehensive and logical account of the geometrical advantages of Copernican theory.Kepler held the chair of astronomy and mathematics at Graz University from 1594 until 1600. Because of his talent as a mat hematician, displayed in his thesis, Kepler was invited by Tycho Brahe to Prague to become his assistant and calculate new orbits for the planets from Tychos observations. Kepler moved to Prague in 1600. Kepler served as Tycho Brahes assistant until the Brahes death. On the death of Brahe in 1601, Kepler assumed his topographic point as imperial mathematician and court astronomer to Rudolf II, Holy Roman emperor. In 1609 his Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy) appeared, which contained his first two laws planets move in elliptical orbits with the sunbathe as one of the laws, and a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times.