1) Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and made important contributions to astronomy, including discovering that planets orbit the sun in ellipses, not circles.
2) Kepler determined that a planet's orbit is an ellipse with the sun at one focus, the radius vector between the sun and planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, and the square of the orbital period is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis.
3) Isaac Newton later showed that Kepler's laws are a natural consequence of his law of universal gravitation.