Leonardo Pisano Bigollo or simply Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician, considered by some "the most talented western mathematician of the Middle Ages." Fibonacci is best known to the modern world for the spreading of the Hindu-Arabic nu...

Roger Bacon was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the nineteenth century) as one of the earliest European ad...

William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey.[1] He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and...

Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer. Toscanelli is noted for his observations of comets and the painstaking calculation of their orbits. Among these was the comet of 1456; only named Halley'...

Nicholas of Kues, also referred to as Nicolaus Cusanus and Nicholas of Cusa, was a cardinal of the Catholic Church from Germany (Holy Roman Empire), a philosopher, jurist, mathematician, and an astronomer. He is widely considered one of the...

Johannes Müller von Königsberg, today best known by the Latin epithet Regiomontanus, was a German mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, translator, instrument maker and Catholic bishop. He was born in the Franconian village of Unfinden,...

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance- and Reformation-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, likely independently of Aristarchus of S...

Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus : Autograph paper codex (1478-1518 c.), 1119 ff., 65x44cm. This is the largest collection of Leonardo's manuscript sheets, formed at the end of the sixteenth century by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who dis...

Gerardus Mercator, Flemish cartographer. He received a master's degree in 1532 from the University of Louvain (Belgium), where he settled. By 24 he was a skilled engraver, calligrapher, and scientific-instrument maker. He and his colleagues...

Carolus Clusius, or Charles de l'Écluse, was a Flemish doctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th century scientific horticulturists. In 1573 he was appointed prefect of the imperial medical garden in Vienna by...

John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and...

Joseph Justus Scaliger was considered to be the foremost scholar in sixteenth-century Europe, referred to as "the light of the world", "the sea of sciences" and similar epithets, and it is to him that we owe a "modern" definition of chronol...

Nicolaus Copernicus: The Ptolemaic system of the universe, with the earth at the center, had held sway since antiquity as authoritative in philosophy, science, and church teaching. Following his precise observations of the heavenly bodies,...

The scientific revolution was the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed views of society and nature. The...

Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and cosmological theorist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars w...