Mysterium Cosmographicum is an astronomy book by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, published at Tübingen in 1597 and in a second edition in 1621. Kepler proposed that the distance relationships between the six planets known at that time could be understood in terms of the five Platonic solids, enclosed within a sphere that represented the orbit of Saturn.
As quoted by Karl Fink, Geschichte der Elementar-Mathematik (1890) translated as A Brief History of Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?id=3hkPAAAAIAAJ (1900, 1903) by Wooster Woodruff Beman, David Eugene Smith. Also see Carl Benjamin Boyer, A History of Mathematics (1968).
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)
Walter William Bryant, Kepler (1920), p. 17
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)
As Quoted in "The Discovery of Kepler's Laws," Scientific American: Supplement (Apr 29, 1911) Vol. 71, No. 1843, p. 278 https://books.google.com/books?id=ov4-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA258.
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)
Walter William Bryant, Kepler (1920), pp. 16–17
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)
As translated and quoted by Bryant, ibid.
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Astronomia nova (1609)
As translated and quoted in John Freely, Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), in chapter 58, at an unspecified page.
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Astronomia nova (1609)
Book V, Introduction
Variant translation: It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
As quoted in The Martyrs of Science; or, the Lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler (1841) by David Brewster, p. 197. This has sometimes been misquoted as "It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."
Variant translation: I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony... I write a book for the present time, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God has also waited six thousand years for an onlooker.
As quoted in Calculus. Multivariable (2006) by Steven G. Krantz and Brian E. Blank. p. 126
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Harmonices Mundi (1618)
