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Person

Christopher Clavius

A portrait depicts a man with reddish-brown hair and a beard, wearing a dark robe over a light-colored shirt with buttons, set against a dark background.

German Jesuit mathematician (1538–1612), professor at the Collegio Romano and the leading astronomer of the Counter-Reformation. He defended and refined Lilius's proposal, calculated the supporting tables, and wrote the eight-hundred-page explanatory tome that finally satisfied Catholic Europe. Galileo would later send him telescope drawings for verification. The crater Clavius on the Moon, one of the largest visible from Earth, is named after him.

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