He was born in 1564, the year of Michelangelo’s death and of
Shakespeare’s birth. After studying and teaching mathematics at the
University of Pisa, he became, in 1592, a teacher of mathematics at the
prestigious University of Padua in the Venetian Republic. There he
remained until he was forty-six years of age, when he received an
invitation from one of his former pupils, Cosimo II de’ Medici, the
Grand Duke of Tuscany, to continue his scientific work in Florence as
Chief Mathematician and Philosopher. He acquired, that is, a patron,
just as artists and writers of the period also did, and it was during this
period of service to the Tuscan court that he accomplished much of the
scientific work that we associate with his name. In 1616, Galileo was
instructed on the authority of Pope Paul V to abandon a theory for
which he had been arguing with increasing skill and ingenuity, namely
Nicholas Copernicus’s theory that it is the Earth, rather than the Sun,
that moves. A panel of ecclesiastical authorities had examined this
theory and had decided that, because the theory ‘contradicted Holy