Eustachio Manfredi

Eustachio Manfredi was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and poet, born in Bologna on 20 September 1674 and dead there on 15 February 1739. After the Jesuit school he took a law degree at the University of Bologna in 1691 while devoting himself to mathematics, astronomy and literature, and about 1690 he founded the Accademia degli Inquieti, which merged in 1714 into the Accademia delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna. He held the chair of mathematics at Bologna from 1698, became superintendent of the waters of Bologna in 1704 and director of its astronomical observatory in 1711, and was a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1726 and of the Royal Society from 1729. With Vittorio Francesco Stancari he discovered the comet C/1707 W1, and in 1719 he found the aberration of the fixed stars ten years before James Bradley. He published the Ephemerides motuum coelestium with the help of his sisters Maddalena and Teresa, and he was a well known Arcadian poet.