Titius-Bode law or Titius's law: see Bode's law.

Bode, Wilhelm von, 1845-1929, German art critic and writer. He abandoned law for art and archaeology in 1869. In 1872 he was made assistant in the Berlin Museum; in 1883, director of the department of Christian sculpture; and in 1890, director of the gallery of paintings. Under his supervision the museum grew into one of the world's greatest collections. From 1905 to 1920 he was director-general of the royal museums of Prussia. His books include Rembrandt (with Hofstede de Groot, 8 vol., 1897-1905; tr. 1906), Great Masters of Dutch and Flemish Painting (tr. 1909), and Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance (1902, tr. 1909).

Bode, Johann Elert, 1747-1826, German astronomer. From 1772 to 1825 he was astronomer of the Academy of Science, Berlin, and from 1786, director of the Berlin Observatory. He is celebrated as the founder (1774) of the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch, but his most noted contribution to astronomy is the Uranographia (1801), a collection of star maps and a catalog of 17,240 stars and nebulae, 12,000 more than had appeared in earlier charts. In 1772 he devised a formula to express the relative distances of the solar system planets from the sun. The same device had been thought out earlier by J. D. Titius of Wittenberg and is therefore sometimes referred to as Titius's law or the Titius-Bode Law, but it is best known as Bode's law.

Bode, Boyd Henry, 1873-1953, American educator, b. Ridott, Ill., grad. Pennsylvania College (Iowa), 1896, Univ. of Michigan, 1897, Ph.D. Cornell Univ., 1900. He taught philosophy at the Univ. of Wisconsin from 1900 to 1909 and at the Univ. of Illinois from 1909 to 1921, at which time he became professor of education at Ohio State Univ. He retired in 1944, having made the university an important center of graduate studies in the philosophy of education. His theories of education are revealed in Fundamentals of Education (1921), Modern Educational Theories (1927), and Conflicting Psychologies of Learning (1929). His Progressive Education at the Crossroads (1938) constitutes an incisive criticism of the progressive education movement.

Rule giving the approximate distances of planets from the Sun. First announced in 1766 by the German Johann Daniel Titius (b. 1729—d. 1796), it was popularized, from 1772, by his countryman Johann Elert Bode (b. 1747—d. 1826). It may be given as follows: To each number in the sequence 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, and so on, add 4 and divide the result by 10. The answers closely approximate the distances from the Sun, in astronomical units, of the first seven planets. Bode's law also suggested that a planet should be found between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroid belt was later discovered. Once thought to have some significance regarding the formation of the solar system, it is now regarded as a numerological curiosity.

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