Giorgio de Santillana was born in Rome, Italy on 30 May 1902[1] into a Sephardic Jewish family, which traced its roots through Tunisia and Livorno back to the Iberian peninsula.
[2] Santillana next moved to the United States in 1936, where he became an instructor in the philosophy of science at The New School for Social Research 1937–1938 and then a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.
On the other hand, the more historically minded reader who prefers to view Galileo in the literary and intellectual costume of his own century would vote for Professor de Santillana's edition.
[13][15][17] Stillman Drake noted it was the first comprehensive study of this trial made available in English since the 1879 translation of Karl von Gebler's prior work, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia, by a Mrs. George Sturge, that it assembled valuable new information regarding the other persons involved in the case, and that it seemed to reference copies of documents so far unknown to other scholars.
[19][20] In 1969, he published his book Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, coauthored with Hertha von Dechend (1915–2001) after he was inspired by her original research shared with him in 1959.
[39] During his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Santillana was noted for his personal friendships with founding figures of cybernetics including Norbert Wiener, Jerome Lettvin, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts, as well as the astronomer and nuclear scientist Philip Morrison.
[1] Santillana died after a long illness beginning in the mid-1960s and a couple of years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts,[2] on 8 June 1974 in Dade County, Florida.