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.