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Christopher Columbus (d.1506) is born as is Amerigo Vespucci (d. 1512), explorers.
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Ferdinand Magellan famously completes the first circumnavigation of the globe.
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Girolamo Fracastoro (1475-1553) provides one of the first descriptions of a new disease in a work entitled Syphilis, or the French Disease. As an aside, the Italians called it the French disease, the French called it Italian disease.
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Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) in his On the Disciplines argues for the reform of education and a more receptive approach to skills traditionally associated with the craft and trade traditions.
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Peter Apian (1495-1552) and Fracastoro observe that the tail of the comet his year, later known as Halley's Comet, pointed away from the sun, a detail also recognized by Regiomontanus.
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Girolamo Fracastoro continued to explore cosmological and technical alternatives to Ptolemy in his Homocentrica, again employing nested concentric spheres rather than deferents and epicycles associated with Ptolemy's Almagest.
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-- Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514-1574), a friend of Copernicus and the presumed author, provides an account of the heliocentric hypothesis in his Narratio prima (First Account).
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Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562) announces his discovery of the fallopian tubes in his Anatomical Observations.
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Galileo Galilei born at Pisa, Italy, February 16; Michelangelo Buonarroti dies at Florence, 18 February; William Shakespeare born in England, 23 April.
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Pope Gregory XIII suggested reform of the Julian calendar, thus leading much of Catholic Europe away from the Julian (Old Style) calendar to the Gregorian (New Style).