Related papers: Gerberto e l'Astronomia
Gerbert of Aurillac was the most prominent personality of the tenth century: astronomer, organ builder and music theoretician, mathematician, philosopher, and finally pope with the name of Silvester II (999-1003). Gerbert introduced firstly…
Gerbert of Aurillac wrote to Constantine of Fleury in 978 a letter to describe in detail the procedure to point the star nearest to the North celestial pole. This was made to align a sphere equipped with tubes to observe the celestial pole,…
A new Italian edition of the Letters of Gerbert, the astronomer, scientist and philosopher who become pope Silvester II, with their papal privileges has been published in the occasion of the international year of astronomy. The italian…
The Jesuit scientist Christopher Clavius (1538-1612) has been the most influential teacher of the renaissance. His contributions to algebra, geometry, astronomy and cartography are enormous. He paved the way, with his texts and his teaching…
The horologia are ancient ephemerides, tables of durations of the days and nights during all months of the year. The algorithms used to compute the horologia are here presented and the results are compared with the tables computed by…
By the twelfth century, northern European scholars gradually embraced Arabic innovations in science and technology. England naturally developed into a significant centre of the new learning in western Europe. Hereford, and specifically its…
The year 2012 will be the fourth centennial year of the Jesuit Christopher Clavius (1535-1612), known as the Euclid of XVI century and the collaborator of the Pope Gregory XIII for the calendar reformation. In the occasion of the year of…
"El Cielo de Salamanca" ("The Sky of Salamanca") is a quarter-sphere-shaped vault 8.70 metres in diameter. It was painted sometime between 1480 and 1493 and shows five zodiacal constellations, three boreal and six austral. The Sun and…
From al-Sufi's tenth-century observation of the Andromeda Galaxy as a "little cloud" to contemporary space missions, Islamic astronomy represents a millennium-spanning tradition of innovation and knowledge. This study traces its trajectory…
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Andr\'e Tacquet, S.J. briefly discussed a scientific argument regarding the structure of a Copernican universe, and commented on Galileo Galilei's discussion of that same argument -- Galileo's…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
Many have have taken in hand to write a treatise on the Star of Bethlehem, particularly on Kepler's explanation as a stellar birth, triggered by Mars joining a great conjunction (a meeting of Jupiter and Saturn), as he observed it in…
After Galileo's publication of the Sidereus Nuncius in 1610, Giovanni Battista Agucchi obtained in 1611 an estimate of the orbital periods of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter using the figures published in the book. The article shows how…
What is the role of algebra in classical mathematics education? How does it relate to the four quadrivial arts? These questions have troubled the mathematical community since the introduction of algebra into the Renaissance academy by men…
In his treatise on light, written in about 1225, Robert Grosseteste describes a cosmological model in which the Universe is created in a big-bang like explosion and subsequent condensation. He postulates that the fundamental coupling of…
The work is divided into three sections: the first one describes the historical evolution of the main arguments presented about the plurality of inhabited worlds, from the presocratics to the birth of modern science. The second section…
This paper celebrates the remarkable life, science and legacy of Abb\'e Georges Lema\^itre, the Belgian cleric and professor of physics; he was the architect of the fireworks model for the origin of the universe. He died half a century ago,…
I discuss various aspects of archeoastronomy concentrating on physical artifacts (i.e., not including ethno-archeoastronomy) focusing on the period that ended about 2000 years ago. I present examples of artifacts interpreted as showing the…
In recent centuries the world has become increasingly dominated by empirical evidence and theoretic science in developing worldviews. Advances in science have dictated Roman Catholic doctrine such as the acceptance of Darwinian evolution…
In this paper, we highlight the influence of Arab/Islamic civilization in the field of the history of astronomy on European historians. We also aim to elucidate the stance of Orientalists toward the study of Arab sciences and to clarify…