13 Facts About Geminiano Montanari

Geminiano Montanari was an Italian astronomer, lens-maker, and proponent of the experimental approach to science.

Geminiano Montanari was a member of various learned academies, notably the Accademia dei Gelati.

Geminiano Montanari is best known for his observation, made around 1667, that the second-brightest star in the constellation of Perseus varied in brightness.

In 1656 Geminiano Montanari left Florence and moved to Salzburg, Austria, where he took a law degree in the same year.

At the beginning of 1661 Geminiano Montanari became court philosopher and mathematician in Modena.

Geminiano Montanari lectured in the afternoon chair while the Bolognese Pietro Mengoli, a renowned disciple of Cavalieri and a parish priest, occupied the morning chair.

In Bologna Geminiano Montanari drew an accurate map of the Moon using an ocular micrometer of his own making.

Geminiano Montanari 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 1665 Geminiano Montanari organized the Accademia della Traccia, the precursor to the Accademia degli Inquieti and the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna.

The academy was established the year after Geminiano Montanari's call to the University, and in the first two years of activity it met at the house of a Bolognese patrician, the Abbot Carlo Antonio Sampieri.

Geminiano Montanari wrote on economics, observing that demand for a particular commodity was fixed, and making comments on coinage and the value of money.

Geminiano Montanari was a close friend of the architect Guarino Guarini.

Fluent and animated in style, Geminiano Montanari freely criticises the mistaken views held in his day on the coinage question, and the injurious effect of alterations in coins, and the raising their nominal value; and points out the rules which should be observed in coining money at the mints.