Francesco Barozzi

Francesco Barozzi, in Latin Franciscus Barocius, was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and humanist, born on 9 August 1537 in Candia (now Heraklion) on Crete, then a Venetian possession, and dead on 23 November 1604. The son of a Venetian nobleman, he studied mathematics at the University of Padua and lived mostly in Venice as an independent scholar on income from his Cretan estate, though he lectured on Sacrobosco's De sphaera at Padua in 1559. He translated many works of the ancients, among them Proclus's edition of Euclid's Elements, published in Venice in 1560, and mathematical works by Hero, Pappus of Alexandria and Archimedes, and he helped in the general reappraisal of the geometry of Euclid. His original works include the Cosmographia of 1585 on the mathematical system of Ptolemy, a 1586 treatise on thirteen ways of drawing a line that never meets another, and the 1572 Rythmomachia, on a mathematical board game.