Orazio Grassi

Orazio Grassi, born in Savona on 1 May 1583 and dead in Rome on 23 July 1654, was an Italian Jesuit priest best noted as a mathematician, astronomer and architect, and one of the authors in the controversy with Galileo on the nature of comets, writing against him under the pseudonym Sarsi. Born when Savona belonged to the Republic of Genoa, he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Sant'Andrea al Quirinale in Rome in 1600 and studied at the Roman College, where his professors included the Jesuit mathematicians Christopher Clavius, Christoph Grienberger and Odo Van Maelcote. After two years as assistant master of novices in Genoa he joined the Roman College faculty as professor of mathematics, with research on pure mathematics, optics and architecture, and in 1617 he published his lectures on the eye, De iride disputatio optica, under the pseudonym Galeazzo Mariscotto, together with the Tractatus tres de sphera, de horologis ac de optica.