Adam Richter (@AdamDRichter) of the Wallifaction Blog (he researches John Wallis) tells me that the Society of Jesus, known colloquially as the Jesuits, was officially recognised by Pope Paul III on 27th September 1540. He gives a short list of Jesuits who have contributed to the history of science over the centuries. Since this blog started I have attempted to draw my readers attention to those contributions by profiling individual Jesuits and their contributions and also on occasions defending them against their largely ignorant critics. I have decided to use this anniversary to feature those posts once again for those who came later to this blog and might not have discovered them yet.
My very first substantive post on this blog was about Christoph Clavius the Jesuit professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit university in Rome, who as an educational reformer introduced the mathematical sciences into the curricula of Catholic schools and universities in the Early Modern Period. I wrote about Clavius then because I was holding a lecture on him at The Remeis Observatory in Bamberg, his hometown, as part of the International Year of Astronomy. I shall be holding another lecture on Clavius in Nürnberg at the Nicolaus Copernicus Planetarium at 7:00 pm on 12 November 2014 as part of the “GestHirne über Franken – Leitfossilien fränkischer Astronomie“ series. If you’re in the area you’re welcome to come along and throw peanuts.
I wrote a more general rant on the Jesuits’ contributions to science in response to some ignorant Jesuit bashing from prominent philosopher and gnu atheist A. C. Grayling, which also links to a guest post I wrote on Evolving Thoughts criticising an earlier Grayling attack on them. This post also has a sequel.
One of Clavius’ star pupils was Matteo Ricci who I featured in this post.
A prominent Jesuit astronomer, later in the seventeenth-century, was Riccioli who put the names on the moon. I have also blogged about Chris Graney’s translation of Riccioli’s 126 arguments pro and contra heliocentricity. Chris, a friend and guest blogger on the Renaissance Mathematicus, has got a book coming out next year on The University of Notre Dame Press entitled Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo. It’s going to be a good one, so look out for it.
Riccioli’s partner in crime was another Jesuit, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, who features in this post on Refraction, refrangibility, diffraction or inflexion.
At the end of the seventeenth-century the Jesuit mathematician, Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, without quite realising what he had achieved, came very close to discovering non-Euclidian geometry.
In the eighteenth-century a towering figure of European science was the Croatian Jesuit polymath, Ruđer Josip Bošković.
This is by no means all of the prominent Jesuit scientists in the Early Modern Period and I shall no doubt return to one or other of them in future posts.
The Renaissance Mathematicus 
For the “126 arguments”, http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1103/1103.2057.pdf is fascinating; thanks for the link. The primary argument against C is the immense size of the fixed stars, as implied by non-parallax and the disks seen in telescopes. The answer to this – that the disks are from diffraction – wasn’t known then but it seems to me that they could have been known to be unreal, because the measured disk would depend on the aperture of the telescope. Did no-one notice that, do you know?
The person to ask is Chris Graney, he’s the expert. However if I remember correctly from Chris’s lecture last Monday in Bamberg it’s first at the end of the seventeenth-century that people became aware that what they were seeing was an artefact. It wasn’t until the nineteenth-century that it was known what caused that artefact. I’m sure the answer to your question will be in Chris’ book 😉
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Can I ‘brighten’ your day by providing a link: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion136.html
I haven’t read the book in question but judging by Zeilberger’s comments it is a doozy