Johannes Kepler - Work in Mathematics and Physics

Work in Mathematics and Physics

As a New Year's gift that year, he also composed for his friend and some-time patron Baron Wackher von Wackhenfels a short pamphlet entitled Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula (A New Year's Gift of Hexagonal Snow). In this treatise, he published the first description of the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes and, extending the discussion into a hypothetical atomistic physical basis for the symmetry and posed what later became known as the Kepler conjecture, a statement about the most efficient arrangement for packing spheres. Kepler was one of the pioneers of the mathematical applications of infinitesimals, see Law of Continuity.

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