J. Kepler,
De nive sexangula, 1611.
An English translation (by Colin Hardie) was published in 1966
by Oxford Press as
The six-cornered snowflake.
This pamphlet is impressive.
It is arguable that no one had worked so hard at three dimensional imaging
since
Democritus and Eudoxus (or their Chinese
equivalents) discovered the volume formula for tetrahedra.
One curious feature that makes it rather difficult to read
is that there are so few images in it and so many attempts to
describe complex 3D phenomena verbally.
I am greatly indebted to the staff at the Fisher Librray and especially
the librarian, Richard Landon, for their cooperation in producing the images
from Kepler's pamphlet that I have used.
