This book traces the life of Tycho Brahe (born 1546): the unusual way he was adopted by his uncle as an infant, his education, his productive years as inventor of precise astronomical instruments before telescopes, his meticulous observations, his personal life, his death as a prematurely aged man in 1601. Tycho’s observations were accurate enough for the mathematical astronomer Kepler to calculate that the planets moved in elliptic orbits, and to discover Kepler's other laws, which gave Newton the facts he needed to establish his inverse-square law of gravitation.
