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:
“Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced—by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)