Johannes Kepler

German astronomer and mathematician (1571–1630), discoverer of the three laws of planetary motion and an early theorist of polyhedra and space-filling.

Kepler sought a geometry of the cosmos: in Mysterium Cosmographicum he nested the Platonic solids to model planetary orbits, and his studies of packing and tiling (the "Kepler conjecture" on sphere packing) anticipated later crystallography and quasi-symmetry.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: forebear. Kepler belongs to the polyhedral-geometry lineage that R. Buckminster Fuller inherited and extended in synergetics. Fuller's concern with closest-packing of spheres, the geometry of the Platonic and Archimedean solids, and the way symmetry organizes nature runs directly through Kepler's work on packing and polyhedra — the same thread the corpus traces forward into penrose tilings and quasicrystals. Kepler is a predecessor in Fuller's cosmology of structure, not a contemporary or collaborator.

See Also

• Regular Polytopes (Regular Polytopes) — Coxeter's treatise on the polyhedral geometry Kepler helped found
• Wizard of the Dome (Wizard of the Dome) — biography tracing Fuller's geometric lineage

Sources

• Penrose Tiling (source reference) — situates Kepler's packing/tiling work in the quasi-symmetry lineage