 The last great Pythagorean was Johannes Kepler (1571–1630 — see Kahn 2001, 161–172 for a good brief account of Kepler’s Pythagoreanism). Kepler began by developing the Copernican system in light of the five regular solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron), to which Plato appealed in his construction of matter in the Timaeus (see especially 53B-55C). He followed the Renaissance practice illustrated above of regarding Greek philosophy as closely connected to the wisdom of the Near East, when he asserted that the Timaeus was a commentary on the first chapter of Genesis (Kahn 2001, 162). In the preface to his early work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Kepler says that his purpose is to show that God used the five regular bodies, “which have been most celebrated from the time of Pythagoras and Plato,” as his model in constructing the universe and that “he accommodated the number of heavenly spheres, their proportions, and the system of their motions” to these five regular solids (tr. Heninger 1974, 110–111).