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Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician. He had a very important role in the birth of modern astronomy because he formulated the three fundamental laws of planets orbits, today named after him.

He was born in Wiel der Stadt, Swabia, a region of south-western Germany, on December 27th, 1571. Johannes didn't love much his parents, given that he defined his father "an immoral rough and quarrelsome soldier" and also his mother hadn't a better consideration.

From 1574 to 1576, he lived with his grandparents, then, he moved with his parents in the near town of Leonberg where the little Johannes started the Latin school. In 1584, he entered the Protestant seminary and, in 1589, the Protestant University of Tubingen where he studied theology. He eventually graduated in 1591 and continued to study as a graduate student in mathematics. His teacher, the astronomer Michael Maestlin (1550-1635) had an important role in Kepler's career because, later, he was one of the first to accept Kepler's heliocentric theory, despite the traditional Ptolemaic system was officially taught in their university.

In the meantime, in 1594, Kepler had become professor of mathematics in Graz, Austria and he remained there until 1600, when all protestants there resident were obliged to convert to the Catholic religion or to go away from that province. During those years, Kepler taught geometry and arithmetic and rhetoric while he continued his personal astronomy and astrology studies and got married (1597) with Barbara Muller.

It can appear strange that Kepler studied astrology but, in that period, there wasn't a neat distinction between these two disciplines, while sharp was the division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the "liberal arts") and physics (a branch of "natural philosophy). So, Kepler used in his writings either scientific and religious arguments, convinced that God had created the world according to a rational plan that we human beings can discover little by little by means of our reason. He tried of not to propose his laws as too "revolutionary" and considered the ancient Aristotle's theories, still officially accepted by the Church and by the scientific world, as completed by his new discoveries on planets motion. Those times were very hard for whom had innovative scientific ideas and being burned on a fire for heresy was not so difficult...

In the same 1597, he published his important essay "The Cosmographic Mystery", where he discussed the

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