Johannes Kepler – the astronomer

Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571 in the Free Imperial city of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart region in Germany).

He was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer and a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion based on his works Astronamia nova, Harmonices Mundi and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.

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.