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The Life of Johannes Kepler Essay

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The Life of Johannes Kepler

HIS LIFE

Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician ho discovered that planetary motion is elliptical. Early in his life, Kepler wanted to prove that the universe obeyed Platonistic mathematical relationships, such as the planetary orbits were circular and at distances from the sun proportional to the Platonic solids (see paragraph below). However, when his friend the astronomer Tycho Brahe died, he gave Kepler his immense collection of astronomical observations. After years of studying these observations, Kepler realized that his previous thought about planetary motion were wrong, and he came up with his three laws of planetary motion. Unfortunately, he did not have a unifying theory for …show more content…

Each interior angle of an equilateral triangle is 60°, therefore we could fit together three, four, or five of them at a vertex, and these correspond to the tetrahedron, the octahedron, and the icosahedron. Each interior angle of a square is 90°, so we can fit only three of them together at each vertex, giving us a cube. The interior angles of the regular pentagon are 108°, so again we can fit only three together at a vertex, giving us the dodecahedron.
That makes five regular polyhedra. However, what would happen if we had a six-sided figure? Well, its interior angles are 120°, so if we fit three of them together at a vertex the angles add up to 360°, and therefore they lie flat. For this reason we cannot use hexagons to make a Platonic solid. In addition, obviously, no polygon with more than six sides can be used either, because the interior angles just keep getting larger.
The Greeks, who had to find religious truth in mathematics, found the idea of exactly five Platonic solids very compelling. The philosopher Plato concluded that they must be the fundamental building blocks of nature, and assigned to them what he believed to be the essential elements of the universe. He followed the earlier philosopher Empedocles in assigning fire to the tetrahedron, earth to the cube, air to the octahedron, and water to the icosahedron. To the dodecahedron, Plato assigned the

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