Geminiano Montanari, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetGeminiano Montanari
Italian astronomer
Date of Birth: 01-Jun-1633
Place of Birth: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Date of Death: 13-Oct-1687
Profession: astronomer
Zodiac Sign: Gemini 
About Geminiano Montanari
- Geminiano Montanari (1 June 1633 – 13 October 1687) was an Italian astronomer, lens-maker, and proponent of the experimental approach to science. He is best known for his observation, made around 1667, that the second-brightest star (called Algol as derived from its name in Arabic) in the constellation of Perseus varied in brightness.
- It is likely that others had observed this effect before, but Montanari was the first named astronomer to record it.
- The star's names in Arabic, Hebrew and other languages, all of which have a meaning of "ghoul" or "demon", imply that its unusual behaviour had long been recognised. Montanari was born in Modena, studied law in Florence, and graduated from the University of Salzburg.
- In 1662 or 1663 he moved to Bologna, where he drew an accurate map of the Moon using an ocular micrometer of his own making.
- He also made observations on capillarity and other problems in statics, and suggested that the viscosity of a liquid depended on the shape of its molecules.
- In 1669 he succeeded Giovanni Cassini as astronomy teacher at the University of Bologna where one of his duties was to compile an astrological almanac.
- He did so in 1665, but perpetrated a deliberate hoax by writing the almanac entirely at random, to show that predictions made by chance were as likely to be fulfilled as those made by astrology.
- In the period shortly after Galileo Galilei, experimentalists like Montanari were engaged in a battle against the more mystical views of scientists such as Donato Rossetti. On 21 March 1676 Montanari reported a sighting of a comet to Edmund Halley. Montanari's observations of the great comet of 1680 are mentioned twice in the third volume of Newton's Principia.In 1679 Montanari moved to a teaching post in Padua, but almost all records of this period of his life have been lost.
- A letter survives from 1682 recording a sighting of Halley's Comet.
- He also wrote on economics, observing that demand for a particular commodity was fixed, and making comments on coinage and the value of money (1683). A crater on the Moon, at 45.8S, 20.6W, is named after him.
Read more at Wikipedia