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:
“The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done;
The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won;
He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day,
In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.”
—Nancy Cartwright (b. 1945)