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.
Read more about this topic: Johannes Kepler
Famous quotes containing the words work, mathematics and/or physics:
“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life.”
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Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.”
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