Johannes Kepler Essay

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler, born on December 27,1571 and passed away on November 15, 1630, is a German mathematician. Kepler was born into a difficult environment as well as a poor family. People believed that Kepler was born as a weak and ill child, however as he grew up, his performance in school improved by day and it was noticed that he was an intelligent child. He first gained interest in astronomy at the age of 3, when his mother took him to see a comet in 1577. At the age of 9, he witnessed a lunar eclipse. Even as a child, he believed in the relationship between numbers and our natural world, which is what his most of his discoveries were based on. Johannes Kepler shaped our perception of astronomy through his well-known laws of planetary motion. (Ann 1-7) His laws mathematically supported the Copernican model (the Heliocentric model), which went against the teachings of the Catholic Church. (“The Galileo Controversy…”, 1) Although people were allowed by the Catholic Church to read and study new ideas, after the Scientific Revolution took place, several scientific works were simply read and put aside. Scientists such as Rene Descartes and Galileo didn’t acknowledge Kepler’s work until about 1630 to 1650, after his death. Despite the fact that Kepler opposed the Catholic Church, he was still a very religious man; in fact he was determined to become a priest but he was offered a job at Protestant School of Graz as a teacher of mathematics.
As Kepler observed and studied our solar system, he began to publish books in which he talked about his new theories and discoveries. Kepler’s first published book in 1596 was called “Mysterium Cosomographicum” this book used the idea of 5 perfect solids to explain the solar system but this idea failed, however it was the foundation of Kepler’s work. (“Kepler’s Major Works…”, 1) In 1604, he wrote, “Astronomiae pars Optica,” in which he talked about the law governing the intensity of light, the reflection by flat...