Galileo and Sports

Galileo’s World at a Glance
Gallery at the Exhibit Website
Location: Headington Hall, University of Oklahoma, Athletics Department.

What would Coach Galileo say?

How many Athletic Departments buy rare books for their university libraries? Three years in a row, the Sooners have contributed a rare book to the OU Libraries Galileo collection: In 2014, the major book of Galileo’s father, a prominent music theorist; in 2013, a beautiful work on perspective drawing by Lorenzo Sirigatti, which Galileo studied; and in 2012, a handwritten manuscript of lectures by the leading astronomer in Rome during Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, never before published and new to scholars. The Galileo’s World exhibition is a way of saying thank you to the OU Sooners for bringing these rare treasures home to Oklahoma.

Section 1: Coach Galileo

1. Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1545), 2d ed., “On the Fabric of the Human Body”
2. Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica (Paris, 1577), “The Art of Gymnastics”
3. Giovanni Borelli, De motu animalium (Leiden, 1685), “On the Motion of Animals”
4. John Pugh, A Treatise on Muscular Action (London, 1794)
5. Galileo, Discorsi à Due Nuove Scienze, in Opera (Bologna, 1656), 2 vols.,”Discourse on Two New Sciences”
6. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Courtier (London, 1724)

Further reading:

• Stillman Drake, Galileo: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001; originally printed 1983 in the Past Masters series), discussion guide.
• Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love (Walker, 1999)
• Maurice Finocchiaro, The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008)

Curators: Kerry Magruder and Brent Purkaple. Links are to the Exhibit Guide, also available from the iBook Store. Open Educational Resources are available at lynx-open-ed.org and ShareOK.