Johann bode biography

(b. Hamburg, Germany, 19 January 1747; d.

Johann Elert Bode was a German astronomer best known for his popularization of Bode's law, or the Titius-Bode rule, an empirical.

Berlin, Germany, 23 November 1826)

astronomy.

Bode, the son of a commercial accounting teacher and the nephew of the well-known writing master and mathematic master Jürgen Elert Kruse of Hamburg, had a great love for practical calculations throughout his life.

This, with his pedagogical abilities, made him an excellent teacher of astronomy. He studied astronomy by himself and was strongly stimulated in his studies by the Hamburg scholars J. A. Reimarus and J.G. Büsch, as well as by the poet Friedrich Klopstock.

They encouraged the nineteen-year-old to publish his famous Anleitung zur Kenntnis des gestirnten Himmels (1768), which was in print for nearly a hundred years and won innumerable adherents to astronomy.

In 1772 Johann Lambert summoned Bode to the astronomical observatory of the Berlin Academy as an arithmetician, to help in the publication of accurate ephemerides.

The sale of astronomical almanacs was