Written by Daksh Sehgal, a grade 6 student

Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaulti de Galilei was a very famous astronomer. He was also an honoured mathematician, philosopher, and cosmologist.

Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564 in Pisa, Italy.  He was one of the six children of Vincenzo Galilei and Guilia di Cosimo Ammanati. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but  Galileo had a deep love for mathematics, so he convinced his father to let him become a maths teacher. Interestingly, he was a college dropout in medicine but did well in mathematics.   

Do you know what made Galileo a famous astronomer? He invented a telescope that helped him discover the phases of Venus, Jupiter’s moon, the stars of the milky way, and the first pendulum clock. He was the first astronomer to look at the Moon through a telescope. He was the one who found that the Moon was not smooth and that it had mountains and craters. 

The Catholic Church and everyone else around Galileo was against him when he said that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In 1632, Galileo was charged with heresy. When someone went against the Church and its teachings, he or she was guilty of heresy and was mostly sentenced to death.

Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1633. Due to his poor health and old age, he was under house arrest. He died from fever on 8  January 1642. During his lifetime, no one took him seriously. But when science was established, his studies were well received by experts. He came to be known by many names, the most popular ones being – ‘father of modern physics’, ‘father of scientific method’, and ‘father of observational astronomy’.

Written by Daksh Sehgal, a grade 6 student