Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World by Amir Alexander Page A

motto of the Accademia Parthenia at the Collegio Romano, open to those at the college who were exceptionally devoted to the Jesuit ideals and way of life. Accompanying the motto was its equally transparent coat of arms, known as an “impresse.” At the top, seated on a throne, is the female figure of Theology. Flanking her, on a lower plane, are her servants Philosophy and Mathematics, reclining and awaiting her command. And so it was in the Society’s schools, where theology reigned as the “queen of the sciences” and imposed her rule upon subordinate subjects. It is a system of knowledge that seems alien to us today, even stifling, designed as it was to establish absolute truths and quash dissent. But the Jesuits believed that the purpose of education was not to encourage the free exchange of ideas, but to inculcate certain truths. And in that, they were undeniably successful.
    AN UNAPPRECIATED MAN
    So things stood in the first decades of the Society of Jesus, when mathematics, if addressed at all, was taught only to the extent that it was useful for other, higher disciplines. And so things would likely have remained were it not for the work of one man who made it his life’s mission to bring mathematics to the center of the Jesuit curriculum. It was thanks to his efforts that, by the dawn of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits had become not only skilled teachers of mathematics, but also leading scholars in the field, numbering among their own some of the most prominent mathematicians in all Europe. His name was Christopher Clavius.
    Little is known of Clavius’s early years—even his true birth name remains in doubt—but we do know that he was born on March 25, 1538, in the city of Bamberg, in the south German province of Franconia. As the seat of a Catholic prince-bishop, but surrounded by the Protestant territories of Nuremberg, Hesse, and Saxony, Bamberg was on the front lines of the struggle for the soul of the Holy Roman Empire. It was cities such as Bamberg that were targeted by the Jesuit Peter Canisius as he barnstormed across the empire, reviving the sagging spirits of the faithful and exhorting them to take a stand against the encroaching Protestant tide. It is easy to imagine the young Clavius attending one of Canisius’s giant Masses at Bamberg Cathedral and being moved by his fiery preaching, but we don’t know this for a fact. What we do know is that, in 1555, as his home city was fending off the forces of the Protestant margrave Albert Alcibiades, Clavius was in Rome. On April 12 he was received as a novice into the Society of Jesus by Ignatius of Loyola himself.
    Clavius was just seventeen when he joined the Society, but he was thirty-seven by the time he professed his final solemn vows. Even considering the lengthy and rigorous Jesuit training regimen, twenty years is an unusually long time for a bright young man to rise from novice to fully formed Jesuit, especially for one who was recognized for his promise early on, and who would ultimately become one of the most famous Jesuits of the age. But it may have had something to do with the fact that Clavius spent much of that time campaigning inside the Society for an unpopular cause: raising the status of mathematics in the Jesuit hierarchy of knowledge and improving the teaching of it in the order’s schools. Some Jesuits, such as Benito Pereira, who was Clavius’s colleague at the Collegio Romano, vigorously opposed him. Nevertheless, by the time Clavius joined the ranks of the “professed” Jesuits in 1575, he was well on his way to winning the fight.
    Clavius spent only a year in Rome after being admitted to the Society as a novice before he was sent off to the Jesuit house in Coimbra, Portugal. Unlike the secluded monasteries of traditional orders such as the Benedictines, such “houses” (or “residences”) were located in the heart of the city or town. There, the local Jesuits lived as a tight-knit community under an appointed