German astronomer and mathematician who contributed greatly to the popularization of astronomy. He published the first atlas of all stars visible to the naked eye, Uranographia 1801, and devised Bode's law.

Bode, born in Hamburg, taught himself astronomy. He was director of the Berlin observatory 1786-1825.
Bode worked on the compilation of two atlases, Vorstellung der Gestirne and Uranographia, which described the positions of more than 17,000 stars and included for the first time some of the celestial bodies discovered by William Herschel. It was Bode who named Herschel's new planet Uranus.