Galileo’s Journey to the Underworld: The Case for Interdisciplinary Thinking

In 1588, the young Galileo delivered some lectures that were impressive enough to secure him a mathematics professorship at the University of Pisa. His subject? The geometry of Dante’s Inferno. In this lecture we’ll look at some of Galileo’s deductions, and how the questions raised may have influenced his later mathematical research. Using this and other examples of creative work in mathematics that crosses our modern ideas of subject boundaries, it will argue that thinking across disciplines is not only intellectually exciting but academically vital.