Giovanni Camillo Glorioso

Ad problema geometricum responsum, 1613

Giovanni Camillo Glorioso (or Gloriosi) (1572 – 8 January 1643) was an Italian mathematician and astronomer.

He was a friend of Marino Ghetaldi and successor of Galileo Galilei in Pisa, then in Padua.

Glorioso's signature in a proxy extract

Life[]

Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was born in the village of Mercato or Santa Maria a Vico of Giffoni Valle Piana. He had a correspondence with Galileo Galilei in 1604 and he replaced him at the University of Padua, with an income of 350 florins per year, in 1613. He led observations on the 1618 comet, on Mars, and on some aspects of Saturn. He came closer to (1577-1662) and he had contrasts with Scipione Chiaramonti and his successor at the university of Pisa, , student of Fortunio Liceti.

He considered, following the theme of the parallax, that comets were in fact celestial bodies, against Galileo's opinion. In a 1610 letter to his friend , he asserted that Galileo erroneously attributed the invention of the telescope and of the sector to himself, instead to Michel Coignet, accusations that appeared to be unfounded: Rosen (1954) shows that Galileo did not affirm to be the inventor of the telescope, which he called the "Dutch tube", but he considered himself as the inventor of its tools, and that was probably cause of confusion. The situation is the same for what concerns the sector, which, in its different forms, had several inventors.^[1] It was excluded, for chronological reasons, that Coignet's tool could have inspired Galileo.^[2]

One of his works took the title from the last work of Alexander Anderson, published in 1619 in Paris: Alexandri Andersoni Exercitationum Mathematicarum Decas Prima.^[3] This work shows that Glorioso wrote his algebrical calculations in a language inherited from the algebra of Viète.^[4] It's one of the first work to use the notation $Aqqc$ for the equivalent of the current $A^{8}$ .

He died in Naples in 1643.

Family[]

Glorioso had a brother, Alessandro, and a sister, Porzia. The properties inherited by the son of his brother Alessandro are in Santa Maria a Vico and in the Serroni di Sei casali. Giovanni Camillo had other relatives in Mercato di Giffoni Valle Piana, among which the Guardian of San Francesco's convent, brother Hieronimo de Glorioso.