Kepler

Johannes Kepler lived between the years 1571 AD and 1630 AD. A contemporary but not close associate of Galileo, Kepler is considered one of the greatest of pure astronomers.Kepler had a troubled life, with numerous children dying quite young of various diseases, and his mother, an herbalist, being accused of witchcraft. With his assistance, his mother was acquitted on the mean-spirited charge.Kepler was quite lucky in one respect though, for he worked for a short time, in Prague, for the well-known and respected astronomer Tycho Brahe. With great effort and long years of work, Kepler was able to use Brahe's meticulously accurate data on Mars' orbit to phenomenologically determine three Laws of Planetary Motion. Those three laws bear his name to this day.Many historians believe that Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion greatly helped Isaac Newton formulate a Law of Universal Gravitation. Perhaps Newton had this in mind when he wrote "If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants".