Galileo Born in Pisa

February 15, 1564

A boy was born in the Tuscan university town of Pisa to a musician and lute theorist named Vincenzo Galilei. Named Galileo, he would grow up to drop objects from leaning towers, build telescopes, discover the moons of Jupiter, and stand trial before the Roman Inquisition. His father's experiments in musical acoustics may have instilled the conviction that nature's laws could be expressed mathematically.