Up to this time he was entirely ignorant of mathematics, his father having carefully held him aloof from a study which he rightly apprehended would lead to his total alienation from that of medicine.
He at first applied the new principle to pulse-measurement, and more than fifty years later turned it to account in the construction of an astronomical clock.
GALILEO INFINITESIMALS VERIFICATION
The experimental verification of this fact led him to the important discovery of the isochronism of the pendulum. In 1581, while watching a lamp set swinging in the cathedral of Pisa, he observed that, whatever the range of its oscillations, they were invariably executed in equal times. In musical skill and invention he already vied with the best professors of the art in Italy his personal taste would have led him to choose painting as his profession, and one of the most eminent artists of his day, Lodovico Cigoli, owned that to his judgment and counsel he was mainly indebted for the success of his works. The natural gifts of the young student seemed at this time equally ready to develop in any direction towards which choice or hazard might incline them. He accordingly matriculated there on the 5th of November 1581, and immediately entered upon attendance at the lectures of the celebrated physician and botanist, Andrea Cesalpino. Having had personal experience of the unremunerative character both of music and of mathematics, he desired that his son should apply himself to the cultivation of medicine, and, not without some straining of his slender resources, placed him, before he had completed his eighteenth year, at the university of Pisa. Selmi in 1864 proves that he was at this time so far attracted towards a religious life as to have joined the novitiate but his father, who had other designs for him, seized the opportunity of an attack of ophthalmia to withdraw him permanently from the care of the monks. From one of the monks he also received instruction in logic but the subtleties of the scholastic science were thoroughly distasteful to him. In the monastery of Vallombrosa, near Florence, where his education was principally conducted, he not only made himself acquainted with the best Latin authors, but acquired a fair command of the Greek tongue, thus laying the foundation of his brilliant and elegant style. His favourite pastime was the construction of original and ingenious toy-machines but his application to literary studies was equally conspicuous. By his wife, Giulia Ammannati of Pescia, he had three sons and four daughters.įrom his earliest childhood Galileo, the eldest of the family, was remarkable for intellectual aptitude as well as for mechanical invention. He was a competent mathematician, wrote with considerable ability on the theory and practice of music, and was especially distinguished amongst his contemporaries for the grace and skill of his performance upon the lute. Vincenzio Galilei was a man of better parts than fortune.
The family, which was nineteen times represented in the signoria, and in 1445 gave a gonfalonier to Florence, flourished with the republic and declined with its fall. His father, Vincenzio, was an impoverished descendant of a noble Florentine house, which had exchanged the surname of Bonajuti for that of Galilei, on the election, in 1343, of one of its members, Tommaso de’ Bonajuti, to the college of the twelve Buonuomini. GALILEO GALILEI (1564–1642), Italian astronomer and experimental philosopher, was born at Pisa on the 15th of February 1564.
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