Index Nominum (Persons)

Prosopographical register of the 32 geometers, astronomers, natural philosophers, patrons, and editors referenced across GEOMETOR Kepler.

Ancient & Medieval Authorities

  • Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) — Founder of the Pythagorean harmonic and geometric tradition; honored by Kepler alongside the Divine Section as discoverer of the first “great treasure of geometry” ([I.47]).

  • Plato of Athens (c. 428 – c. 348 BC) — Author of the Timaeus, associating the regular polyhedra with elemental structure and the dodecahedron with the cosmos.

  • Aristotle of Stagira (384 – 322 BC) — Author of Posterior Analytics, De Caelo, and Metaphysics; critically engaged by Kepler on mathematical causality and space-filling polyhedra.

  • Euclid of Alexandria (fl. c. 300 BC) — Author of the Elements (Stoicheia), Books I, II, IV, VI, X, and XIII, supplying the demonstrative backbone of Mysterium Cosmographicum and Harmonices Mundi.

  • Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 – c. 212 BC) — Discoverer of the thirteen semi-regular convex solids reconstructed and proved complete by Kepler in Harmonices Mundi Book II.

  • Apollonius of Perga (c. 240 – c. 190 BC) — Author of the Conics, whose focal theory of the ellipse enabled Kepler’s planetary kinematics.

  • Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170 AD) — Author of the Almagest and the Harmonics, whose chord geometry and celestial harmonics Kepler transformed onto a heliocentric foundation.

  • Pappus of Alexandria (c. 290 – c. 350 AD) — Author of the Synagoge, Book V of which preserved the hexagonal honeycomb theorem and face counts of the 13 Archimedean solids.

  • Proclus Diadochus (412 – 485 AD) — Neoplatonic commentator on Euclid Book I, quoted extensively by Kepler on innate archetypal geometry.

  • Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) (c. 1170 – c. 1250) — Author of Liber Abaci (1202); Kepler independently formulated the additive law $1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21\dots \to \phi$ in Strena (1611).

  • Campanus of Novara (c. 1220 – 1296) — Medieval Latin commentator on Euclid, noted for star-pentagram angles and Book X irrationals.

Renaissance & Early Modern Contemporaries

  • Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa) (1401 – 1464) — Cardinal and mathematical theologian (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440), praised by Kepler as divinus mihi Cusanus for contrasting the spherical curved (Creator) with the polyhedral straight (creation).

  • Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (c. 1447 – 1517) — Author of De Divina Proportione (1509), establishing Renaissance terminology of the Divine Proportion.

  • Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) — Author of Underweysung der Messung (1525) on polyhedral nets, pentagonal rosettes, and practical heptagon approximations.

  • Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) — Author of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), establishing the six heliocentric planetary orbs harmonized by Kepler.

  • Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514 – 1574) — Author of Narratio Prima (1540), appended by Mästlin to the 1596 Mysterium Cosmographicum.

  • Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) (1515 – 1572) — Humanist critic of Euclid Book X, refuted by Kepler in Harmonices Mundi Book I Prooemium.

  • Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) — Imperial observational astronomer whose Mars and planetary data anchored both Astronomia Nova (1609) and Harmonices Mundi Book V (1619).

  • Michael Mästlin (1550 – 1631) — Professor of Mathematics at Tübingen, Kepler’s mentor, editor of the 1596 Mysterium, and recipient of the October 1597 Kepler Right Triangle letter ($1/\phi \approx 0.6180340$).

  • Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels (1550 – 1619) — Imperial Aulic Councillor at Prague and dedicatee of Strena seu de Nive Sexangula (1611).

  • Jost Bürgi (1552 – 1632) — Swiss Imperial clockmaker and Cossic algebraist whose chord equation for the regular heptagon Kepler critiqued in Harmonices Mundi Book I Prop. XLV.

  • Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) — Astronomer and physicist whose Sidereus Nuncius (1610) discoveries of Jupiter’s moons Kepler celebrated and integrated into Harmonices Mundi Book V.

  • Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) — Provincial Mathematician at Graz, Imperial Mathematician at Prague, and Mathematician at Linz; author of Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596/1621), Astronomia Nova (1609), Strena (1611), and Harmonices Mundi (1619).

  • Willebrord Snellius (1580 – 1626) — Dutch mathematician at Leiden addressed by Kepler in Harmonices Mundi Book I concerning Euclid Book X.

Modern Editors & Mathematical Heirs

  • Louis Poinsot (1777 – 1859) — Rediscovered Kepler’s two stellated dodecahedra in 1809–1810 and discovered their duals.

  • Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855) — Characterized constructible regular $n$-gons via Fermat primes in Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801).

  • Christian Frisch (1807 – 1881) — Editor of the eight-volume critical Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia (1858–1871).

  • Pierre Laurent Wantzel (1814 – 1848) — Proved in 1837 that irreducible cubics (including the heptagon and nonagon) are non-constructible by ruler and compass.

  • Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 – 1948) — Author of On Growth and Form (1917/1942), extending Kepler’s Strena into mathematical biology.

  • Petrus Hubertus Jacobus Hoenen, S.J. (1880 – 1961) — Author of De Noetica Geometriae (1954) in the GEOMETOR canon.

  • Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter (1907 – 2003) — Author of Regular Polytopes, systematizing Kepler’s uniform tilings, star polyhedra, and zonohedra.

  • Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931) — Discoverer of non-periodic pentagonal/decagonal tilings (1974) inspired directly by Kepler’s Figure Aa.

  • Thomas Callister Hales (b. 1958) — Proved the 1611 Kepler Sphere-Packing Conjecture (1998/2005) and led its Flyspeck formal verification (2014).