Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630 Stutgart, Germany)

His earlier works combined astronomy, astrology and geometry in looking for patterns in the structure of the universe. In "Mysterium Cosmographicum" he demonstrated that the five Platonic solids* enclosed in spheres could be fitted inside one another in a way that closely matched the distances of the planets from the sun.
Around 1610 Kepler published his laws of planetry motion.

1) The planets describe elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus of the ellipse

2) A line joining the planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas of space in equal time (this means that planets travel faster when they are nearer the sun.)

3) In the third law Kepler establishes the link between the speed of the planets and their distance from the Sun: Namely that the square of the period of a planet's orbit is proportioned to the cube of the semi-major axis of the ellipse.

Kepler also wrote "Solemnium", a science fiction story about a man who travelled to the moon.

*Platonic Solids. The only five regular polyhedrons octahedron, icosahedran, dodecahedron, tetrahedron and cube