Johannes Kepler
(Würtemburg, present-day Germany, 1571-Regensburg, id., 1630) German astronomer, mathematician and physicist.The son of a mercenary (who served for money in the hosts of the Duke of Alba and disappeared into exile in 1589) and a mother suspected of practicing witchcraft, Johannes Kepler overcame the consequences of an unhappy and sordid childhood thanks to his tenacity and intelligence.
Johannes Kepler
After studying at the seminaries of Adelberg and Maulbronn, Kepler entered the University of Tübingen (1588), where he studied theology and was also a disciple of the astronomer Michael Mästlin, a follower of Copernicus.In 1594, however, he interrupted his theological career by accepting a position as professor of mathematics at the Protestant seminary in Graz.
Four years later, a few months after entering into a marriage of convenience, the edict of the Archduke Ferdinand against the Protestant teachers forced him to leave Austria, and in 1600 he moved to Prague at the invitation of Tycho Brahe.When he died suddenly the following year, Kepler replaced him as Rudolf II's imperial mathematician, commissioned to complete the astronomical tables initiated by Brahe and as an astrological adviser, a role he frequently resorted to for a living.
But the most important work of Kepler was the review of the cosmological schemes known from the large number of observations accumulated by Brahe (especially those relating to Mars), work that led to the publication, in 1609, from the Astronomia nova (New astronomy), the work that contained the first two laws called Kepler, relative to the ellipticity of the orbits and the equality of the swept areas, in equal times, by the vector radii that unite the planets with the Sun.
He completed his work during his stay in Linz, where he enunciated the third of his laws, which numerically relates the periods of revolution of the planets with their distances averages to the Sun; He published it in 1619 in Harmonices mundi (On the harmony of the world), as one more of the harmonies of nature, the secret of which he believed to have managed to reveal thanks to a peculiar synthesis between astronomy, music and geometry.
Comments
Post a Comment