ABSTRACT
Promoted the mathematical sciences, including astronomy, and established their place in the curriculum of the far-flung and influential Jesuit college network. He designed and put into practice a mathematics curriculum that shaped generations of Jesuit-educated scholars. While Clavius also helped start the Jesuit colleges at Messina and Naples, he spent most of his life teaching in Rome at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. He also wrote many books, including a very early printed edition and commentary on Euclid’s Elements. He produced a long series of revised editions of his Commentary on Sacrobosco’s Sphere, which served as an introductory astronomy textbook for much of sixteenth-century Europe and which is an important source for the history of cosmology in that period. Clavius was one of the technical advisers on the papal committee that formulated the Gregorian-calendar reform and became Pope Gregory’s principal expositor and defender of the reform. He also wrote treatises on geometry, arithmetic, gnomonics, the astrolobe, and the like.
