Christoph Grienberger

Christoph Grienberger (1561 to 1636), also spelled Gruemberger, Bamberga or Gamberger, was an Austrian Jesuit astronomer, after whom the crater Gruemberger on the Moon is named. Born in Hall in Tirol, he joined the Jesuits in 1580, studied in Prague and Vienna, and in 1612 succeeded his tutor Christopher Clavius as professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano. In 1610 church officials asked him, with Clavius and other mathematicians of the faculty, for an opinion on the new phenomena Galileo had seen with his telescope; he sympathised with Galileo theory of motion but was asked by the Jesuit Father General to defend the Aristotelian view of the universe. He was not a prolific author, his name being attached only to a thin volume of star charts and a set of trigonometric tables, but as technical censor of all mathematical works by Jesuit authors he reviewed and evaluated the writings of many others.