Since it's in the news Here's a passage from Arthur Koestler's "The Watershed," (a biography of Kepler). Kepler is trying to work out the orbit of Mars (pg 132, "The Giving of the Laws") * * * ** He chose out of Tycho's treasure four observe positions of Mars at the convenient dates when the planet was in opposition to the sun. The geometrical problem which he had to solve was, as we saw, to determine, out of these four positions, the radius of the orbit, the direction of the axis, and the position of three central points on it.... ...at times he was despairing, he felt, like Rheticus, that a demon was knocking his head against the ceiling, with the shout, "These are the motions of Mars!" At the other times, he appealed for help to Maestlin (who turned a deaf ear), to the Italian astronomer, Magini (who did the same), and thought of sending an SOS to Francois Vieta, the father of modern algebra: "Come, O Gallic Apollonius, bring your cylinders and spheres and what other geometer's houseware you have..." But in the end he had to slog it out alone, and to invent his mathematical tools as he went along. Halfway through [his] dramatic sixteenth chapter, he bursts out: "If thou [dear reader] art bored with this wearisome method of calculation, take pity on me who to go through with at least seventy repetitions of it, at a very great loss of time; nor wilst thou be surprised that by now the fifth year is nearly past since I took on Mars..." Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.plambeck.org