How Johannes Kepler contributed to modern science?
... supporter of Copernicus, in his idea that the center of the solar system is the Sun. In the sixteenth century, most people believed in the ideas, that the planets, Moon, and Sun all orbited around the Earth. While Copernicus was close to predicting planetary motion, Kepler solved the problem completely. Kepler’s teacher in mathematics was Michael Maestlin. Maestlin was one of the few astronomers that also accepted Copernicus’s theories, so Kepler became highly influenced by his teacher. Kepler graduated and obtained his B.A. degree in 1588 and his M.A. degree in 1591. In 1594 he was sent to Graz, Austria to replace a high school mathematics teacher. While a teacher, Kepler wrote many books and publications. Many of his publications and books caught the attention of several people. One of these several people was a Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Brahe was impressed by his ability to apply mathematics with astronomy. In 1599, Brahe offered Kepler to join his team of astronomers in Prague. Kepler accepted this offer to join his team and also became his assistant. As a member of Brahe’s team he was given the assignment of investigating the orbit of the planet Mars. While doing this task, Kepler keenly observed the planetary motion of Mars and from this research he was able to develop the three laws of planetary motion. In 1601, Brahe unfortunately passed away and Kepler was appointed the Imperial Mathematician of the team, the most prestigious position in mathematics in Europe. In 1605, Kepler announced the first law of planetary motion. The first law was called “The Law of Ellipses” and stated that Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. This law means that each planet revolves around the Sun in an elliptical path, not in a circular path. The second law was called “The Equal-Areas Law” stated that the radius vector describes equal areas in equal times. This means that planets go faster when they are closer to the sun, and slower when they are farther away from the sun. He published the first two laws in his book Astronomia Nova in 1609. Kepler continued to study the orbits of planets and came across a relation between the time of a planet's orbit and its distance from the Sun. This was the third law of planetary motion, “The Harmonic Law”. It was discovered in 1618, and lead to Newton’s law of universal gravitation. This law stated “The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances”. In other words, the ratio of a planet’s distance from the sun cubed to the planet’s orbital period squared is a constant, which is the same for all of the planets in the solar system. This third and final law was published in his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619. Kepler was able to use thi...