Johannes Kepler was a famous mathematician and astronomer. Kepler studied many different fields, from optics, to celestial mechanics, which describes how the planets move. He was born in fifteen seventy one in modern day Germany to a poor Lutheran family. Fortunately, Kepler was very intelligent, enough to earn him a scholarship to a local university. He learned about the Copernican model of the solar system there and soon published the first paper defending it, Mysterium Cosmographicum. Soon, Kepler was forced to leave his position because of religious conflict. He moved to Prague and worked with a respected astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Using the data Brahe collected, Kepler was able to determine the shape of Mars’ orbit, an ellipse. He published all his and Brahe’s data in his book, Astronomia Nova. This book described what are …show more content…
He had personal and financial troubles throughout his life, but still continued to work. Kepler published several more books detailing heliocentric astronomy and predicting planetary movement. Kepler used logarithms he developed to find the position of any planet known at that time at any given date. Using this data he estimated that dates of the transits of Mercury and Venus, but he did not live to see them. Kepler died in 1630 and his grave was destroyed during the Thirty Years War. Some of Kepler’s most important achievements are in optics. He was the first to explain the camera obscura effect, where light travels through a small hole and appears inverted, or upside down. This effect was observed by Aristotle over one thousand years before, but nobody had been able to describe it until Kepler. These studies lead to modern photography and video. He also used this to study the human eye and was the first to describe how the biological lenses work. He also studied depth perception and parallax, and was able to explain how humans use two eyes to determine distance from