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Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), an Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist,
is considered a founder of the experimental method. The son of a musician, Galileo
was educated in a monastery near Florence before studying medicine at the University
of Pisa and mathematics with a private tutor. After completing a treatise on
the center of gravity in solids, he became a lecturer (later professor) in mathematics
at the University of Padua. The story of his dropping weights from the Tower
of Pisa is apocryphal.
Galileo's conflict with the Catholic church arose over his support of Copernicus's
theory that the planets revolve around the sun. He was the first to apply a
mathematical analysis to the mechanics of this theory. Among his other accomplishments,
Galileo suggested the use of pendulums for clocks and proposed the Law of Uniform
Acceleration for falling bodies. He developed the astronomical telescope, with
which he discovered craters on the moon, sunspots, the phases of Mercury, and
the satellites of Jupiter. He showed that the Milky Way is composed of stars.
Galileo lived the last eight years of his life under house arrest for having
held and taught Copernican doctrine. His major works are Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632) and Dialogue
Concerning Two New Sciences (1638).
Bibliography
Works by the Author
Galileo. Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences. Translated by
Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. Chicago: Northwestern University, 1946.
Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Ptolemaic and
Copernicus. Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley: University of California,
1953.
Source
The biographical material about the author originally appeared on The
Goodrich Room: Interactive Tour website.
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