ABSTRACT
What future lay in store for mathematical science in its newly realist form? Kepler resigned himself to a very long wait before his own achievement would attain its well-deserved recognition. In the introduction to what he regarded as his crowning achievement, book V of Harmonice mundi, he famously wrote:
well, then, I throw the dice and write a book, no matter whether it be read by contemporaries or later generations – it may await its reader for a hundred years, as God himself waited six thousand years for a witness. 154
