Graziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a German mathematician and astronomer. He lived in Prague and worked with the astronomer, Tycho Brahe, at about the same time that Galileo lived in Italy.
Kepler was strongly influenced by Copernicus’ Heliocentric theory, apparently attracted to the Copernican system by its mathematical beauty and simplicity. This, he believed, was evidence--as had the Pythagoreans believed so long before--that God had created a beautifully harmonious universe.
Kepler used his mathematical background to work out the three laws of planetary motion that summarized and organized a vast amount of data that had been accumulated by astronomers by that time. Kepler’s laws were to serve later as the bases for Isaac Newton’s work.