Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt, Germany, to a poor family. Smallpox in childhood left him with weak eyesight. He studied theology at Tübingen, intending to become a Lutheran minister, but a teacher there introduced him to the idea of Copernicus that the planets circle the Sun, and he became a mathematics teacher in Graz. In 1600 he went to Prague to work with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had made the most accurate observations of the planets ever recorded. After Tycho died in 1601, Kepler became imperial mathematician and spent years working on the orbit of Mars. He found that the planets move in ellipses, not perfect circles, and move faster when closer to the Sun, published in his New Astronomy in 1609; a third law, relating a planet's period to its distance, followed in 1619. He believed he was thinking God's thoughts after him. His life was hard: his first wife and several children died, and he spent years defending his mother against a charge of witchcraft. He died in 1630.

Johannes Kepler is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born to Lutheran parents and trained at a Lutheran seminary; he remained a Lutheran. Source: Wikipedia