What was galileo famous for
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Galileo’s Early Life, Education and Experiments
Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564, the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei, a musician and scholar. In 1581 he entered the University of Pisa at age 16 to study medicine, but was soon sidetracked by mathematics. He left without finishing his degree. In 1583 he made his first important discovery, describing the rules that govern the motion of pendulums.
Did you know? After being forced during his trial to admit that the Earth was the stationary center of the universe, Galileo allegedly muttered, "Eppur si muove!" ("Yet it moves!" ). The first direct attribution of the quote to Galileo dates to 125 years after the trial, though it appears on a wall behind him in a 1634 Spanish painting commissioned by one of Galileo's friends.
From 1589 to 1610, Galileo was chair of mathematics at the universities of Pisa and then Padua. During those years he performed the experiments with falling bodies that made his most significant contribution to physics.
Galileo had three children with Marina Gamba, whom he never married: Two
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Galileo Galilei
1. Brief Biography
Galileo was born in Pisa on February 15, 1564. By the time he died on January 8, 1642 (but for problems with the date, see Machamer 1998b, 24–25), he was as famous as any person in Europe. Moreover, when he was born there was no such thing as ‘science’; yet by the time he died, science was well on its way to becoming a discipline, and its concepts and method a complete philosophical system.
Galileo’s father Vincenzo, though of noble heritage, was a semi-itinerant court musician and composer of modest means, who also authored treatises on music theory; his mother, Giulia Ammannati, descended from Pisan cloth merchants. In 1572, they resettled the family in Florence. As a boy, Galileo was tutored privately and, for a time, by the monks at Vallombrosa, where he considered a religious vocation and may have started a novitiate. He returned home, however, and then enrolled for a medical degree at the University of Pisa in 1580. He never completed this degree, but instead studied mathematics, notably with Ostilio Ricci, a ma
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Galileo Galilei (1564‐1642)
Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564 in Pisa and was educated at the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa. In 1581 was sent by his father to enrol for a medical degree at the University of Pisa. Galileo never seems to have taken medical studies seriously, attending courses on his real interests which were in mathematics and natural philosophy. He left Pisa in 1585 without completing his medical degree and began teaching mathematics in Florence and later at Siena. During the summer of 1586 he taught at Vallombrosa, and in this year he wrote his first scientific book The little balance (La Balancitta) which described Archimedes' method of finding the specific gravities of substances using a balance. His reputation grew and in 1588 he received a prestigious invitation to lecture on the dimensions and location of hell in Dante's Inferno at the Academy in Florence. In 1589, Galileo was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Pisa where he wrote De Motu a series of essays on the theory of motion which he never formally publi
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