February 15 birthday person. Father of modern science by general consensus. Many aspects of his story are well known. Including the preserved middle finger? His father played the lute. Son might have stayed on same path but got all sciencey instead. Thus became memorable in a way that other 'guitarists of his day are not.
"It [the Universe] is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth." GG was on the scene when math meant geometry. Calculus came along later and helped a lot. Then, modern physics and astrophysics and all the other things y'all hated in school. So the dark labyrinth became somewhat illuminated. Dark matter and dark energy remain. Kludges.
