Christoph Grienberger

He studied in Prague and Vienna, and subsequently succeeded his tutor, Christopher Clavius, as professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano in 1612.

[1] In 1610, Jesuit and high church officials had turned to Grienberger, as well as Clavius, Paolo Lembo, and Odo Van Maelcote, the other mathematicians on the faculty of the Collegio Romano, for their opinion on the new phenomena Galileo had discovered with his telescope.

However, he was asked to defend the Aristotelian view of the universe by Claudio Acquaviva, the Father General of the Jesuits.

Grienberger was not a prolific author–in his lifetime, his name was attached only to a thin volume of star-charts and a set of trigonometric tables–but he occupied a post that allowed him to review and evaluate the works of many other authors.

Mario Bettinus, author of Apiaria Universae Philosophiae Mathematicae, an encyclopedic collection of mathematical curiosities, includes in this text the following confession: "I have benefited, my Reader, from the mind and industry of the very learned and exceedingly modest man, Grienberger, who, while he would have discovered many marvellous things by himself, preferred to make himself serviceable to other people's inventions and other people's praises".