Everything about Christopher Clavius totally explained
Christopher Clavius, (
March 25,
1538 –
February 12,
1612) was a
German Jesuit mathematician and
astronomer who was the main architect of the modern
Gregorian calendar. In his last years he was probably the most respected astronomer in
Europe and his textbooks were used for astronomical education for over fifty years in Europe and even in more remote lands (on account of being used by
missionaries).
Very little is known about Clavius' early life other than the fact that he was born in
Bamberg in either 1538 or 1537 (the exact year is somewhat unknown and depends on when one assumes a
new year begins). His given name isn't known to any great degree of certainty — it's thought by scholars to be perhaps
Christoph Clau or
Klau. There are also some who think that his taken name, "Clavius", may be a pun on his original German name, suggesting that his name may have been "Schlüssel" (German for "key", which is "clavis" in Latin).
Clavius joined the
Jesuit order in
1555. He attended the
University of Coimbra in
Portugal, where it's possible that he'd some kind of contact with the famous mathematician
Pedro Nunes. Following this he went to Italy and studied theology at the Jesuit
Collegio Romano in
Rome. In
1579 he was assigned to compute the basis for a reformed calendar that would stop the slow process in which the Church's holidays were drifting relative to the seasons of the year. Using the
Prussian Tables of
Erasmus Reinhold, he proposed a calendar reform that was adopted in
1582 in Catholic countries by order of
Pope Gregory XIII and is now the
Gregorian calendar used worldwide.
Within the Jesuit order, Clavius was almost single-handedly responsible for the adoption of a rigorous mathematics curriculum in an age where mathematics was often ridiculed by philosophers and theologians.
As an astronomer Clavius held strictly to the
geocentric model of the solar system, in which all the heavens rotate about the
Earth. Though he opposed the
heliocentric model of
Copernicus, he recognized problems with the orthodox model. He was treated with great respect by
Galileo, who visited him in
1611 and discussed the new observations being made with the
telescope; Clavius had by that time accepted the new discoveries as genuine, though he retained doubts about the reality of the mountains on the
Moon. Later, a
large crater on the moon was named in his honour.
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