Giovanni Alfonso Borelli

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, who lived from 1608 to 1679, was an Italian physiologist, physicist and mathematician often described as the father of biomechanics, born in Naples. He studied under Benedetto Castelli in Rome, served as professor of mathematics in Messina from 1635 to 1656, where the senate offered him membership of the Accademia della Fucina, and around 1655 was invited to the University of Pisa by Ferdinando de' Medici, taking the mathematics post in 1656 and meeting Marcello Malpighi there. He was a founder-member of the short-lived Accademia del Cimento of 1657. Continuing Galileo's practice of testing hypotheses against observation, he made extensive studies of Jupiter's moons, the mechanics of animal locomotion and, with the microscope, the constituents of blood, and he was the first scientist to explain that animal and human bodily movements are caused by muscular contractions. His revised Euclides Restitutus of 1658 restored Euclid's Elements. He enjoyed the patronage of Queen Christina of Sweden and died in Rome in 1679.