Engineering Mathematics – Calculus

ePrep Course

Applied Projects

Engineering Mathematics – Calculus ePrep Course 

Sample Applied Project

Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion

Johannes Kepler stated the following three laws of planetary motion on the basis of massive amounts of data on the positions of the planet at various times.

The Three Kepler’s Laws are

  1. A planet revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit with the sun at one focus.
  2. THe line joining the sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times.
  3. The square of the period of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of the length of the major axis of its orbit.

Kepler formulated these laws becaude they fitted the astronomical data. He wasn’t able to see why they were true or how they were related to ech other. But Sir Issac Newton, in his Principia Mathematica of 1687, showed how to deduce Kepler’s three laws from two of Newton’s own laws, the Second Law of Motion and the Law of Gravitation.


The proofs of these three laws are given in the textbook.