List of Italians - Scientists

Scientists

• Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799), linguist, mathematician and philosopher, considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics
• Adriano Aguzzi (born 1960), director of the Institute of Neuropathology at Zurich University, discovered pathogenetic mechanisms involved in neurodegenerative diseases
• Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), naturalist, noted for his systematic and accurate observations of animals, plants and minerals
• Giovanni Battista Amici (1786–1863), astronomer and microscopist. The inventor of the catadioptric microscope (presented at the Arts and Industry Exhibition in Milan in 1812)
• Antonio Amodeo (... – ...), heart surgeon, together to his team implanted the world's first completely artificial heart into a 15-year-old boy (2010)
• Giovanni Arduino (1714–1795), father of Italian geology, who established bases for stratigraphic chronology by classifying the four main layers of the Earth's crust
• Silvano Arieti (1914–1981), psychiatrist and psychoanalyst long recognized as a leading authority on schizophrenia
• Alessandro Artom (1867–1927), physicist, specializing in radiolelegraphy. He invented the Artom system of telegraphy, and also made discoveries in dielectrics and meteorology
• Gaspare Aselli (c. 1581–1625), physician who contributed to the knowledge of the circulation of body fluids by discovering the lacteal vessels
• Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974), psychiatrist and psychologist. The founder of the healing system known as psychosynthesis
• Gjuro Baglivi (1668–1707), physician and scientist. He published the first clinical description of pulmonary edema and made classic observations on the histology and physiology of muscle
• Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), psychiatrist. He was the promoter of an important reform in the Italian mental health system, the "legge 180/78" (law number 180, year 1978)
• Agostino Bassi (1773–1856), entomologist. The first person to succeed in the experimental transmission of a contagious disease
• Laura Bassi (1711–1778), scientist who was the first woman to become a physics professor at a European university
• Catia Bastioli (born 1957), chemist, allowed the production of the first bioplastics from renewable
• Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (c. 1460 – c. 1530), physician and anatomist who was the first to describe the heart valves
• Giulio Bizzozero (1846–1901), anatomist. He is known as the original discoverer of Helicobacter pylori (1893)
• Enrico Bombieri (born 1940), mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in number theory
• Claudio Bordignon (born 1950), biologist, performed the first procedure of gene therapy using stem cells as gene vectors (1992)
• Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679), physiologist and physicist who was the first to explain muscular movement and other body functions according to the laws of statics and dynamics
• Enrico Bottini (1835–1903), surgeon. A precursor of antiseptic treatment of wounds (used phenol as an antiseptic 2 years before Joseph Lister)
• Giacomo Bresadola (1847–1929), clergyman and a prolific and influential mycologist
• Francesco Brioschi (1824–1897), mathematician. He is best remembered for his contributions to the theory of algebraic equations and to the applications of mathematics to hydraulics
• Giuseppe Brotzu (1895–1976), physician, famous for having discovered the cephalosporin (1948)
• Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli (1761–1818), chemist, inventor of electroplating (1805)
• Tito Livio Burattini (1617–1681), mathematician, in his book Misura Universale, published in 1675, first suggested the name meter as the name for a unit of length
• Nicola Cabibbo (1935–2010), physicist who reconciled these strange-particle decays with the universality of weak interactions
• Leopoldo Marco Antonio Caldani (1725–1813), anatomist and physiologist. He is noted for his experimental studies on the function of the spinal cord
• Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti (1853–1922), physicist, invented a tube filled with iron filings, called a "coherer" (1884)
• Tommaso Campailla (1668–1740), physician, philosopher and poet, inventor of "vapour stovens" that he used to fight syphilis rheumatism
• Giuseppe Campani (1635–1715), optician and astronomer who invented a lens-grinding lathe
• Giuseppe Candido (1837–1906), Bishop of the Catholic Church, physicist, created a device able to emit a constant current for long periods of time
• Stanislao Cannizzaro (1826–1910), chemist, in 1858 put an end to confusion over values to be attributed to atomic weights, using Avogadro's hypothesis
• Federico Capasso (born 1949), physicist, one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser (QCL) in 1994
• Mario Capecchi (born 1937), molecular geneticist, famous for having contribution to development of "knockout mice" (1989)
• Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576), mathematician and physician; initiated the general theory of cubic and quartic equations. He emphasized the need for both negative and complex numbers
• Antonio Cardarelli (1831–1926), physician remembered for describing Cardarelli's sign
• Antonio Carini (1872–1950), physician and bacteriologist who discovered Pneumocystis carinii, which is responsible for recurrent pneumonia in patients with AIDS
• Francesco Carlini (1783–1862), astronomer. Worked in the field of celestial mechanics, improved the theory of the motion of the Moon
• Giovanni Caselli (1815–1891), physicist, inventor of the pantelegraph (1861)
• Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712), mathematician, astronomer, engineer and astrologer who was the first to observe four of Saturn's moons
• Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), mathematician. He invented the method of indivisibles (1635) that foreshadowed integral calculus
• Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (born 1922), population geneticist, currently teaching since 1970 as emeritus professor at Stanford University. One of the most important geneticists of the 20th century
• Tiberius Cavallo (1749–1809), physicist and natural philosopher who wrote on the early experiments with electricity. He was known contemporaneously as the inventor of Cavallo's multiplier
• Filippo Cecchi (1822–1887), physicist, inventor of the first modern seismograph (1875)
• Ugo Cerletti (1877–1963), neurologist, co-inventor with Lucio Bini, of the method of electroconvulsive therapy in psychiatry
• Vincenzo Cerulli (1859–1927), astronomer. The author of the idea that the canali are just a special kind of optical illusion
• Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), physician, philosopher and botanist, produced the first scientific classification of plants and animals by genera and species
• Ernesto Cesàro (1859–1906), mathematician. In 1880 he developed methods of finding the sum of divergent series. Cesaro made important contributions to intrinsic geometry
• Giacinto Cestoni (1637–1718), naturalist, studied fleas and algae, and showed that scabies is provoked by Sarcoptes scabiei (1689)
• Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759–1820), physician who introduced humanitarian reforms to the psychiatric hospital care of people with mental disorders
• Realdo Colombo (c. 1516–1559), one of the first anatomists in the Western world to describe pulmonary circulation
• Orso Mario Corbino (1876–1937), physicist and politician, discovered modulation calorimetry and Corbino effect, a variant of the Hall effect
• Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti (1822–1876), anatomist, known for his discoveries on the anatomical structure of the ear
• Domenico Cotugno (1736–1822), physician. He discovered albuminuria (about a half century before Richard Bright) and was also one of the first scientists to identify urea in human urine
• Alessandro Cruto (1847–1908), inventor who improved on Thomas Alva Edison incandescent light bulb with carbon filament (1881)
• Alessandro Dandini (... – ...), scientist, famous for having invented the three-way light bulb in the 20th century
• Bruno de Finetti (1906–1985), probabilist, statistician and actuary, noted for the "operational subjective" conception of probability
• Annibale de Gasparis (1819–1892), astronomer, his first asteroid discovery was 10 Hygiea in 1849. Between 1850 and 1865, he discovered eight more asteroids
• Ennio de Giorgi (1928–1996), mathematician. He brilliantly resolved the 19th Hilbert problem. Today, this contribution is known as the De Giorgi-Nash Theorem
• Achille de Giovanni (1838–1916), physician. Called the father of Italian constitutionalism, availed his research of anthropometry to determine the differences between individuals
• Mondino de Liuzzi (c. 1270–1326), physician and anatomist whose Anathomia corporis humani (MS. 1316; first printed in 1478) was the first modern work on anatomy
• Ruggero de Maria (born 1964), physician, discovered stem cells responsible for causing colon cancer (2007)
• Francesco de Vico (1805–1848), astronomer. He discovered a number of comets, including periodic comets 54P/de Vico-Swift-NEAT and 122P/de Vico
• Giambattista della Porta (c. 1535–1615), scholar and polymath. He is best known for his work Magia Naturalis (1558), which dealt with alchemy, magic, and natural philosophy
• Luigi Devoto (1864–1936), physician. The founder of the world's first occupational health clinic (1910)
• Ulisse Dini (1845–1918), mathematician and politician whose most important work was on the theory of functions of real variables
• Eustachio Divini (1610–1685), physician and astronomer; maker of clocks and lenses (1646), innovative compound microscope (1648)
• Giovanni Battista Donati (1826–1873), astronomer. He becomes one of the first to systematically adapt the new science of spectroscopy to astronomy
• Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio (1330–1388), doctor and clock-maker at Padua, son of Jacopo Dondi, builder of the Astrarium
• Jacopo Dondi dell'Orologio (1293–1359), doctor and clock-maker at Padua, father of Giovanni
• Angelo Dubini (1813–1902), physician who identified Ancylostoma duodenale (1838)
• Renato Dulbecco (born 1914), virologist. He is probably best known for his brilliant work with two viruses that can transform animal cells into a cancer-like state in the test tube
• Pio Emanuelli (1888–1946), astronomer at the Vatican Observatory; invented celestial maps
• Federigo Enriques (1871–1946), mathematician, known principally as the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry
• Vittorio Erspamer (1909–1999), pharmacologist and chemist, famous for having discovered the serotonin (1935) and octopamine (1948)
• Bartolomeo Eustachi (1500 or 1514–1574), anatomist. He described many structures in the human body, including the Eustachian tube of the ear
• Francesco Faà di Bruno (1825–1888), mathematician, best known for the Faà di Bruno formula (1855, 1857)
• Hieronymus Fabricius (1537–1619), anatomist and surgeon, called the founder of modern embryology
• Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), anatomist and physician. His important discoveries include the fallopian tubes, leading from uterus to ovaries
• Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), physicist, constructed the world's first nuclear reactor (1942), initiated the atomic age; father of atom bomb
• Lodovico Ferrari (1522–1565), mathematician, famous for having discovered the solution of the general quartic equation
• Galileo Ferraris (1847–1897), physicist and electrical engineer, noted for the discovery of the rotating magnetic field, basic working principle of the induction motor
• Amarro Fiamberti (... – ...), psychiatrist who first performed a transorbital lobotomy (by accessing the frontal lobe of the brain through the orbits) in 1937
• Leonardo Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1250), mathematician, eponym of the Fibonacci number sequence (1202)
• Fortunato Fidelis (1550–1680), physician. The first person to practice modern forensic medicine (1598)
• Quirico Filopanti (1812–1894), mathematician and politician, remembered for inventing time zones (1858)
• Giorgio Fischer (... – ...), surgeon. The inventor of the liposuction (1974)
• Francesco Folli (1623–1685), physician and writer; invented the hygrometer, an instrument used to measure the atmospheric humidity (1664)
• Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (1499–1557), mathematician who originated the science of ballistics
• Carlo Forlanini (1847–1918), physician, inventor of artificial pneumothorax (1882) for treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis
• Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553), physician and scholar, the first to state the germ theory of infection and is regarded as the founder of scientific epidemiology
• Guido Fubini (1879–1943), mathematician, eponym of Fubini's theorem in measure theory
• Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), physicist and astronomer. The founder of modern science who accurately described heliocentric solar system
• Cesare Galli (... – ...), cloning expert, together to his team of Italian scientists created the world's first cloned horse (2003)
• Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), physician and physicist, noted for his discovery of animal electricity
• Angelo Giuseppe Maria Gatti (1730–1798), professor of medicine at the University of Pisa. A pioneer in the fight against smallpox
• Agostino Gemelli (1878–1959), physician, psychologist, and priest, founder of a university and eponym of the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic
• Luca Ghini (1490–1556), physician and botanist, creator of the first recorded herbarium and the first botanical garden in Europe
• Riccardo Giacconi (born 1931), astrophysicist, called the father of X-ray astronomy
• Clelia Giacobini (1931–2010), microbiologist, a pioneer of microbiology applied to conservation-restoration
• Cesare Gianturco (1905–1995), pioneering radiologist, co-inventor with Gary Roubin, of the coronary stent (1976 ?)
• Corrado Gini (1884–1965), statistician, demographer and sociologist, developer of Gini coefficient
• Camillo Golgi (1843–1926), histologist noted for work on the structure of the nervous system and for his discovery of Golgi apparatus (1897)
• Luigi Guido Grandi (1671–1742), philosopher, mathematician and engineer. He is best known for studying the rose curve, a curve which has the shape of a petalled flower, and for Grandi's series
• Giovanni Battista Grassi (1854–1925), zoologist who discovered that mosquitoes were responsible for transmitting malaria between humans
• Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618–1663), physicist and mathematician, noted for his discoveries in the field of optics, he was the first to describe the diffraction of light
• Nicola Guarino (born 1954), scientist, co-inventor with Chris Welty, of the OntoClean, the first methodology for formal ontological analysis
• Guido da Vigevano (c. 1280 – c. 1349), physician and inventor who became one of the first writers to include illustrations in a work on anatomy
• Giovanni Battista Hodierna (1597–1660), astronomer. He was one of the first to create a catalog of celestial objects with a telescope
• Giulio Iasolino (1538–1622), physician. The author of the Natural remedies of the Island of Pithaecusa (1588), thought to be the first treatise on medical hydrology
• Nicola Ielpo (born 1936), former director of State Mint and Polygraphic Institute, inventor of bimetallic coin
• Arturo Issel (1842–1922), geologist, palaeontologist, malacologist and archaeologist. He is noted for first defining the Tyrrhenian Stage (1914)
• Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), Italian-French who made major contributions to mathematics and physics, and was one of the world's greatest mathematicians
• Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654–1720), clinician and anatomist who is considered the first modern hygienist
• Marco Lanzetta (born 1963), surgeon who performed the world's first hand transplant (1998)
• Rita Levi-Montalcini (born 1909), neurologist, famous for having discovered the nerve growth factor (NGF)
• Aloysius Lilius (c. 1510–1576), astronomer and physician. The principal author of the Gregorian Calendar (1582)
• Salvador Luria (1912–1991), microbiologist. He shared a 1969 Nobel Prize for investigating the mechanism of viral infection in living cells
• Cesare Magati (1579–1647), surgeon. He is remembered for De rara medicatione vulnerum (1616), which discusses the theory and method of healing wounds
• Giovanni Antonio Magini (1555–1617), astronomer, astrologer, cartographer and mathematician, known for his reduced size edition of Ptolemy's Geographiae (1596)
• Ettore Majorana (1906–1938), theoretical physicist. He is noted for the eponymous Majorana equation
• Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), physician and biologist. He is regarded as the founder of microscopic anatomy and may be regarded as the first histologist
• Massimo Marchiori (... – ...), computer scientist who made major contributions to the development of the World Wide Web. He was also the creator of HyperSearch
• Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), physicist and inventor of a successful wireless telegraph (1896)
• Alberto Marmont (... – ...), professor of hematology, introduced the Stem Cell transplant for SLE (1996); treatment for the severe autoimmune diseases
• Macedonio Melloni (1798–1854), physicist, demonstrated that radiant heat has similar physical properties to those of light
• Giuseppe Mercalli (1850–1914), volcanologist and seismologist, inventor of the Mercalli intensity scale (1902)
• Franco Modigliani (1918–2003), economist and educator who received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1985 for his work on household savings and the dynamics of financial markets
• Geminiano Montanari (1633–1687), astronomer. Today, it is better known for his discovery of the variability of the star Algol (c. 1667)
• Maria Montessori (1870–1952), physician, educator and originator of the educational system that bears her name (1907)
• Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771), anatomist, called the founder of pathologic anatomy
• Angelo Mosso (1846–1910), physiologist who created the first crude neuroimaging technique
• Giulio Natta (1903–1979), chemist, famous for having discovered isotactic polypropylene (1954) and polymers (1957)
• Adelchi Negri (1876–1912), pathologist and microbiologist who identified what later became known as Negri bodies (1903) in the brains of animals and humans infected with the rabies virus
• Leopoldo Nobili (1784–1835), physicist, designed the first precision instrument for measuring electric current (1825)
• Giuseppe Occhialini (1907–1993), physicist, contributed to the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947, with César Lattes and Cecil Frank Powell
• Barnaba Oriani (1752–1832), astronomer. Great scholar of orbital theories
• Filippo Pacini (1812–1883), anatomist who isolated the Vibrio cholerae (1854) ; the bacteria that causes cholera
• Antonio Pacinotti (1841–1912), physicist, inventor of the dynamo (1858) and electric motor (1858)
• Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), mathematician. He popularized the system of double accounting for keeping financial records and is often known as the father of modern accounting
• Ferdinando Palasciano (1815–1891), physician and politician, considered one of the forerunners of the foundation of the Red Cross
• Luigi Palmieri (1807–1896), physicist and meteorologist, inventor of the mercury seismometer
• Pier Paolo Pandolfi (born 1963), geneticist, discovered the genes underlying acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL)
• Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), engineer, sociologist, economist, and philosopher, eponym of Pareto distribution, Pareto efficiency, Pareto index and Pareto principle
• Giorgio Parisi (born 1948), theoretical physicist, called the father of the modern field of chaos theory
• Giuseppe Paseo (... – ...), mathematician. Inventor of fractal lines (1896)
• Emanuele Paternò (1847–1935), chemist, discoverer of the Paternò–Büchi reaction (1909)
• Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), mathematician and a founder of symbolic logic whose interests centred on the foundations of mathematics and on the development of a formal logical language
• Pier Giuseppe Pelicci (born 1956), oncologist, discovered how cancer stem cells become immortal
• Gaetano Perusini (1879–1915), physician, remembered for his contribution to the description of Alzheimer's
• Giuseppe Piazzi (1746–1826), mathematician and astronomer who discovered (1 January 1801) and named the first asteroid, or "minor planet", Ceres
• Raffaele Piria (1814–1865), chemist. The first to successfully synthesize salicylic acid (1839); the active ingredient in aspirin
• Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana (1781–1864), astronomer and mathematician. The founder of the Observatory of Turin
• Annibale Puca (born 1967), physician, famous for having discovered longevity genes
• Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), physician, considered a founder of occupational medicine
• Francesco Redi (1626–1697), physician who demonstrated that the presence of maggots in putrefying meat does not result from spontaneous generation but from eggs laid on the meat by flies
• Jacopo Riccati (1676–1754), mathematician. He is best known in connection with his problem, called Riccati's equation, published in the Acla eruditorum (1724)
• Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), missionary to China, mathematician, linguist and published the first Chinese edition of Euclid's Elements
• Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (1853–1925), mathematician, inventor of tensor analysis collaborator with Tullio Levi-Civita
• Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671), astronomer, devised the system for the nomenclature of lunar features that is now the international standard
• Augusto Righi (1850–1920), physicist who played an important role in the development of electromagnetism
• Giovanni Guglielmo Riva (1627–1677), physician. He described the lymphatic circulation (with the Danish Thomas Bartholin)
• Scipione Riva-Rocci (1863–1937), internist and pediatrician. The inventor of the first mercury sphygmomanometer
• Rogerius (before 1140 – c. 1195), surgeon who wrote a work on medicine entitled Practica Chirurgiae ("The Practice of Surgery") around 1180
• Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835), philosopher, economist and jurist, famous for having discovered the same link between electricity and magnetism
• Bruno Rossi (1905–1993), experimental physicist. An authority on cosmic rays
• Carlo Rubbia (born 1934), physicist who in 1984 shared with Simon van der Meer the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the massive, short-lived subatomic W particle and Z particle
• Paolo Ruffini (1765–1822), mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups
• Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (1667–1733), philosopher and mathematician who did early work on non-Euclidean geometry, although he didn't see it as such
• Giuseppe Sanarelli (1864–1940), bacteriologist, discovered the causal agent of yellow fever, which he called Bacillus icteroides (1892)
• Sanctorius (1561–1636), physiologist and physician. He laid the foundation for the study of metabolism
• Antonio Scarpa (1752–1832), anatomist, famous for the anatomical eponyms Scarpa triangle and Scarpa ganglion of the ear
• Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), astronomer and science historian who first observed lines on the surface of Mars, which he described as canals
• Angelo Secchi (1818–1878), astronomer. He is known especially for his work in spectroscopy and was a pioneer in classifying stars by their spectra
• Emilio Segrè (1905–1989), physicist. Best known for his discovery of the antiproton
• Francesco Selmi (1817–1881), chemist. One of the founders of colloid chemistry
• Enrico Sertoli (1842–1910), physiologist and histologist. The discoverer of the cells of the seminiferous tubules of the testis that bear his name (1865)
• Ascanio Sobrero (1812–1888), chemist, famous for having discovered the synthesis of nitroglycerine (1846)
• Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), biologist and physiologist, called the father of artificial insemination (done at Pavia in 1784)
• Francesco Stelluti (1577–1652), polymath who worked in the fields of mathematics, microscopy, literature and astronomy; in 1625 he published the first accounts of microscopic observation
• Gasparo Tagliacozzi (1546–1599), plastic surgeon. He is considered a pioneer in the field; called the father of plastic surgery
• Vincenzo Tiberio (1869–1915), microbiologist, attributes itself generally the discovery of penicillin (1895)
• Giuseppe Toaldo (1719–1797), physicist, gave special attention to the study of atmospheric electricity and to the means of protecting buildings against lightning
• Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), physicist and mathematician, inventor of the barometer (1643)
• Trotula (11th–12th centuries), physician who wrote several influential works on women's medicine; whose texts on gynecology and obstetrics were widely used for several hundred years in Europe
• Pellegrino Turri (... – ...), has built the first typewriter proven to have worked in 1808. He also invented carbon paper (1806)
• Ugo da Lucca (1180–1258), prominent member of the medical society in Italy. Famous for having discovered (and introduced) the local anesthesia in the 13th century
• Carlo Urbani (1956–2003), physician. The first person to discover severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 1998
• Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), physician and naturalist who made numerous experiments in entomology and human organology, and combated the doctrine of spontaneous generation
• Sansone Valobra (1799–1883), chemist. Generally regarded as the inventor of matches
• Antonio Maria Valsalva (1666–1723), professor of anatomy at Bologna. He described several anatomical features of the ear in his book, De aure humana tractatus (1704)
• Costanzo Varolio (1543–1575), is remembered for his studies on the anatomy of the brain, and his description of the pons that bears his name
• Gabriele Veneziano (born 1942), theoretical physicist and a founder of string theory
• Giovanni Battista Venturi (1746–1822), physicist. He was the discoverer and eponym of Venturi effect
• Emilio Veratti (1872–1967), anatomist who described the sarcoplasmic reticulum
• Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), electricity pioneer, eponym of the volt, inventor of the electric battery (1800)
• Vito Volterra (1860–1940), mathematician and physicist who strongly influenced the modern development of calculus
• Giuseppe Zamboni (1776–1846), physicist who invented the Zamboni pile (1812); a model of dry battery
• Francesco Zantedeschi (1797–1873), physicist who published papers (1829, 1830) on the production of electric currents in closed circuits by the approach and withdrawal of a magnet
• Niccolò Zucchi (1586–1670), astronomer and physicist. May have been the first to observe belts on the planet Jupiter with a telescope (on 17 May 1630), also claimed to have explored the idea of a reflecting telescope in 1616, predating Galileo Galilei and Giovanni Francesco Sagredo's discussions of the same idea a few years later.
• Giovanni Battista Zupi (c. 1590–1650), astronomer and mathematician. The first person to discover that the planet Mercury had orbital phases