John Kepler

Johannes Kepler ( 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music.

Kepler was born on 27 December 1571, in the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart Region in the German state of Baden-Württemberg).

His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the city.

By the time Johannes was born, he had two brothers and one sister and the Kepler family fortune was in decline.

His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old.

He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands.

His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist.

Born prematurely, Johannes claimed to have been weak and sickly as a child.

Nevertheless, he often impressed travelers at his grandfather's inn with his phenomenal mathematical faculty.

He was introduced to astronomy at an early age and developed a strong passion for it that would span his entire life.

At age six, he observed the Great Comet of 1577, writing that he "was taken by [his] mother to a high place to look at it."

In 1580, at age nine, he observed another astronomical event, a lunar eclipse, recording that he remembered being "called outdoors" to see it and that the Moon "appeared quite red".

However, childhood smallpox left him with weak vision and crippled hands, limiting his ability in the observational aspects of astronomy.

Under the instruction of Michael Maestlin, Tübingen's professor of mathematics from 1583 to 1631, he learned both the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system of planetary motion.

He became a Copernican at that time.

In a student disputation, he defended heliocentrism from both a theoretical and theological perspective, maintaining that the Sun was the principal source of motive power in the universe.

Despite his desire to become a minister in the Lutheran church, he was denied ordination because of beliefs contrary to the Formula of Concord.

Near the end of his studies, Kepler was recommended for a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz.

In 1589, after moving through grammar school, Latin school, and seminary at Maulbronn, Kepler attended Tübinger Stift at the University of Tübingen.

There, he studied philosophy under Vitus Müller and theology under Jacob Heerbrand (a student of Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg), who also taught Michael Maestlin while he was a student, until he became Chancellor at Tübingen in 1590.

He proved himself to be a superb mathematician and earned a reputation as a skilful astrologer, casting horoscopes for fellow students.

He accepted the position in April 1594, at the age of 22.

Before concluding his studies at Tübingen, Kepler accepted an offer to teach mathematics as a replacement to Georg Stadius at the Protestant school in Graz (now in Styria, Austria).

During this period (1594–1600), he issued many official calendars and prognostications that enhanced his reputation as an astrologer.

Although Kepler had mixed feelings about astrology and disparaged many customary practices of astrologers, he believed deeply in a connection between the cosmos and the individual.

In December 1595, Kepler was introduced to Barbara Müller, a 23-year-old widow (twice over) with a young daughter, Regina Lorenz, and he began courting her.

Müller, an heiress to the estates of her late husbands, was also the daughter of a successful mill owner.

Her father Jobst initially opposed a marriage.

He eventually published some of the ideas he had entertained while a student in the Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), published a little over a year after his arrival at Graz.

He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, influencing among others Isaac Newton, providing one of the foundations for his theory of universal gravitation.

The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science.

He has been described as the "father of science fiction" for his novel Somnium.

Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg.

Later he became an assistant to the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II.

He also taught mathematics in Linz, and was an adviser to General Wallenstein.

Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, being named the father of modern optics, in particular for his Astronomiae pars optica.

He also invented an improved version of the refracting telescope, the Keplerian telescope, which became the foundation of the modern refracting telescope, while also improving on the telescope design by Galileo Galilei, who mentioned Kepler's discoveries in his work.

Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy).

Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason.

Kepler described his new astronomy as "celestial physics", as "an excursion into Aristotle's Metaphysics", and as "a supplement to Aristotle's On the Heavens, transforming the ancient tradition of physical cosmology by treating astronomy as part of a universal mathematical physics.