His daughters were nuns.

His daughters were nuns.

Galileo’s eldest daughter, Virginia, or Sister Maria Celeste.

Galileo had three children with a woman named Marina Gamba, who he never married. In 1613, he placed his two daughters, Virginia, born in 1600, and Livia, born in 1601, in a convent near Florence, where they remained for the rest of their lives, despite their father’s eventual troubles with the Catholic Church. Galileo maintained close ties with his older daughter, who became known as Sister Maria Celeste. From inside the convent, she baked and sewed for him, among other tasks. He in turn gave food and supplies to the impoverished convent. Galileo’s son, Vincenzo, born in 1606, studied medicine at the University of Pisa, married well and resided in Florence as an adult.

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Galileo was sentenced to life in prison by the Roman Inquisition.

Galileo was sentenced to life in prison by the Roman Inquisition.

Copernicus’ heliocentric theory about the way the universe works challenged the widely accepted belief, espoused by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century, that put the Earth at the center of the solar system. In 1616, the Catholic Church declared Copernican theory heretical because it was viewed as contradicting certain Bible verses. Galileo received permission from the Church to continue investigating Copernicus’ ideas, as long as he didn’t hold or defend them. In 1632, he published “Dialogue of the Two Principal Systems of the World,” and although it was presented as a discussion between friends about the ideas of Ptolemy and Copernicus, the book was seen as supporting the Copernican model of the universe. As a result, the following year Galileo was ordered to stand trial before the Inquisition in Rome. After being found guilty of heresy, Galileo was forced to publicly repent and sentenced to life in prison.

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He spent his final years under house arrest.

He spent his final years under house arrest.

Although Galileo was given life behind bars, his sentence soon was changed to house arrest. He lived out his final years at Villa Il Gioiello (“the Jewel”), his home in the town of Arcetri, near Florence. Barred from seeing friends or publishing books, he nonetheless received visitors from around Europe, including philosopher Thomas Hobbes and poet John Milton. Additionally, he managed to smuggle out the manuscript for a new work, “Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences,” about physics and mechanics. The book, Galileo’s last, was published in Holland in 1638. That same year, Galileo went totally blind. He died on January 8, 1642, at age 77.

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His middle finger is on display in a museum.

His middle finger is on display in a museum.

Galileo’s middle finger on display in 2009. (Credit: Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

After Galileo died, he was buried in a side chapel at the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Nearly a century later, in 1737, as the scientist’s remains were being transferred to a burial place of honor in the Santa Croce basilica three of his fingers, along with a vertebra and a tooth, were removed from his corpse. Two of Galileo’s fingers, along with his tooth, were kept by one of his admirers and handed down through generations of his relatives. The items were thought to be lost sometime in the early 1900s. However, in 2009, the two fingers and tooth appeared at an auction and were snapped up by a private collector; using historical documentation, experts later concluded the items were Galileo’s. Meanwhile, the third finger taken from Galileo’s remains—the middle finger of his right hand—has been housed at various museums in Italy since at least the first half of the 1800s. The purloined vertebra ended up at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught from 1592 to 1610.

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He didn’t invent the telescope.

He didn’t invent the telescope.

Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Galileo didn’t invent the telescope—Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is generally credited with its creation—but he was the first person to use the optical instrument to systematically study the heavens. Lippershey’s patent application for the device in 1608 is the earliest on record; however, because the Dutch government decided the telescope was too easy to copy and because another Dutch instrument-maker had tried to patent the device a short time after Lippershey, no patent was granted. In 1609, Galileo learned about the device and developed one of his own, significantly improving its design. That fall, he pointed it at the moon and discovered it had craters and mountains, debunking the common belief that the moon’s surface was smooth.

Galileo soon went on to make other findings with his telescope, including that there were four moons orbiting Jupiter and that Venus went through a complete set of phases (indicating the planet traveled around the sun). Galileo’s discoveries brought him acclaim and in 1610 he was named the chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke of Tuscany as well as chief mathematician at the University of Pisa. More significantly, Galileo’s observations would lead him to support the theory, laid out in 1543 by Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the sun is the center of the universe and the Earth and other planets revolve around it.

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He was a college dropout.

He was a college dropout.

Galileo, whose father was a lute player and music theorist, was born in Pisa, Italy. Although his father was from a noble family, they weren’t wealthy. As a preteen, Galileo began studying at a monastery near Florence and considered becoming a monk; however, his father wasn’t in favor of his son pursuing a religious life and eventually removed him from the school. When he was 16, Galileo enrolled at the University of Pisa to study medicine, at his father’s urging. Instead, though, he became interested in mathematics and shifted his focus to that subject. Galileo left the school in 1585 without earning a degree. He continued his mathematics studies on his own and earned money by giving private lessons before returning to the University of Pisa in 1589 to teach math.

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Jean-Francois Champollion

The secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics might never have been revealed if not for the former child prodigy Jean-Francois Champollion. Born in France in 1790, he displayed a natural talent for languages from an early age and went on to master Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Sanskrit and Coptic by his mid-teens. Champollion presented his first academic paper at 16, and by 19 he was already teaching history at a school in Grenoble. In the early 1820s, the young polyglot turned his attention toward deciphering the mysteries of the Rosetta Stone. He soon became the first philologist to recognize that the symbols of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were both pictographic and alphabetical—a breakthrough that proved to be the key to cracking the code of a long-lost language.

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Ms Clara Schumann

German-born musician Clara Schumann didn’t speak until age 4, but by the time she was 7 she was already spending up to three hours a day mastering the piano. She began composing her own pieces at 10, and made her concert debut in 1830 at the age of 11. In 1831, Schumann embarked on the first of several tours of Europe, where she won acclaim from the likes of Chopin and Liszt and astonished audiences with her ability to play from memory. The young virtuoso later married fellow composer Robert Schumann in 1840, but defied convention by continuing to write and perform even while raising her children. By the time she died in 1896, Schumann had spent six decades as a professional musician and played more than 1,300 public concerts.

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Arthur Rimbaud

Vagabond poet Arthur Rimbaud is often held up as one of history’s few examples of a literary prodigy. An award-winning student, the Frenchman published his first work in 1870 at the age of 15 before running away to Paris and making his name as a writer and rabble-rouser. Rimbaud produced his early masterpiece “The Drunken Boat” when he was just 16. He followed it up three years later with “A Season in Hell,” a hallucinatory prose poem that helped set the stage for the surrealist movement. Along the way, he engaged in a drug and alcohol-fueled love affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and won plaudits from the likes of Victor Hugo, who supposedly dubbed him “an infant Shakespeare.” While Rimbaud’s work would later influence Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and many others, the teen phenom stopped writing altogether at age 20. He later roamed through the Middle East and Africa and worked as a trader and gunrunner before dying from cancer at age 37.

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Blaise Pascal

Born in 1623 in France, Blaise Pascal spent his youth being privately tutored at home by his father. The elder Pascal banished mathematics texts from the house to ensure the boy first focused on languages, but by age 12, young Blaise had secretly invented his own terminology and independently discovered nearly all the geometric proofs of Euclid. His mathematical genius only grew from there. At 16, he produced an essay on conic sections so advanced that the famed philosopher Rene Descartes was convinced his father must have ghostwritten it; by 19, he had designed and built a mechanical calculator known as the “Pascaline.” Pascal went on to publish papers and conduct experiments on everything from fluid mechanics and perpetual motion to atmospheric pressure and the philosophy of religion. Before his death at the age of 39, he developed his famous “Pascal’s Wager,” which uses probability theory to argue for belief in God.

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Mr Pablo Picasso

As the son of a painter, Pablo Picasso had a brush in his hand from an early age. The future art legend could reportedly draw before he could talk, and his mother claimed that when he finally spoke, his first words were to ask for a pencil. Picasso made his first oil painting when he was 9 years old. His skills soon surpassed those of his father, and at age 14, he was admitted to a prestigious Barcelona art school. Just a year later, he completed “First Communion,” an astonishingly mature work that was displayed in a public exhibition. The painting was among the first of the more than 22,000 artworks that Picasso would produce in his eight-decade career. “When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope,’” he later said. “Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Born in Mexico in 1651, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz learned to read as a toddler and quickly blazed through all the books in her grandfather’s library. Despite being denied a formal education because of her gender, she began writing religious poetry at age 8 and later taught herself Latin, supposedly mastering it in just 20 lessons. By her adolescence, she had also studied Greek logic and learned an Aztec language called Nahuatl. Juana’s reputation for genius later won her a place as a lady-in-waiting at the viceroy’s court in Mexico City. When she was 17, she was famously tested by a panel of 40 university professors, all of whom were shocked by her deep knowledge of philosophy, mathematics and history. The former child prodigy entered a convent at age 20 and spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun. She continued her studies, however, and eventually established herself as one of the 17th century’s most popular authors of drama, poetry and prose. Her image now appears on the 200-peso bill in Mexico.

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Mr Enrico Fermi

Before his work on radioactivity won him the Nobel Prize and helped usher in the nuclear age, Enrico Fermi was considered a mathematics and physics prodigy. The Italy native showed signs of having a photographic memory as a boy, and by age 10 he was spending his free time mulling over geometric proofs and building electric motors. After his brother died unexpectedly in 1915, 13-year-old Enrico dealt with his grief by burying himself in books on trigonometry, physics and theoretical mechanics. He then applied to the University of Pisa in 1918, wowing the admissions panel with a doctoral-level essay that solved the partial differential equation of a vibrating rod. Fermi achieved his post-secondary degree from the school several years early at the age of just 21. He later conducted groundbreaking experiments in neutron bombardment and nuclear chain reactions before becoming one of the lead physicists on the Manhattan Project—the secret research program that developed the atomic bomb.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The Austrian-born wunderkind first took up the harpsichord when he was just 3 years old. He composed his first piece of published music at age 5, and by his teen years, he had already written several concertos, sonatas, operas and symphonies. Mozart and his sister Maria Anna—herself a musical prodigy—traveled widely through Europe exhibiting their talents in royal courts and public concerts. From Bavaria to Paris, audiences marveled at the boy wonder’s ability to improvise and play the piano blindfolded or with one hand crossed over the other. During a 1764 stopover in London, he was even tested and examined by a British lawyer and naturalist named Daines Barrington, who was awestruck by the 8-year-old’s ability to sight-read unfamiliar music “in a most masterly manner.” Mozart would eventually grow into one of Europe’s most celebrated and prolific composers. Before his untimely death at age 35, he wrote more than 600 pieces of music.

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Drebbel

English mathematician William Bourne made a percentage of the most punctual known arrangements for a submarine around 1578, however the world's first working model was implicit the seventeenth century by Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutch polymath and designer in the utilize of the British King James I. Drebbel's sub was likely a changed paddle boat covered in lubed calfskin and kept an eye on by a group of rowers. At some point around 1620, he utilized it to plunge 15 feet underneath the River Thames amid an exhibition saw by King James and a large number of dumbfounded Londoners. Tragically, none of Drebbel's arrangements or designing drawings has made due to today, so students of history can just figure about how his "plunging watercraft" really worked. A few records say it submerged by means of a gathering of bladders or wooden counterbalance tanks, while others recommend that a slanting bow and an arrangement of weights were utilized to move the pontoon submerged when it was paddled at full speed.

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