Dialogo

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was born in Pisa and taught mathematics there and at Padua. He studied falling bodies and pendulums, and in 1609 built a telescope with which he discovered the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the Moon, which he announced in The Sidereal Messenger.

His defence of the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun brought him before the Inquisition in 1633; forced to recant, he spent his last years under house arrest near Florence, where, going blind, he completed his book on motion that prepared the way for Newton.