Galileo's 1588 Calculation of Hell's Dimensions in Dante's Inferno

Around 1588, early in his career, Galileo Galilei was commissioned by the Florentine Academy to determine the precise dimensions of hell as depicted in Dante's Divine Comedy. He concluded that hell's roof must be centered in Jerusalem, span the radius of the entire Earth, and be at least 600 kilometers thick. His model drew inspiration from Filippo Brunelleschi's dome atop the Florence Cathedral, which had stood for a century and a half. Galileo's findings opposed an earlier model by scholar Alessandro Vellutello but supported one by architect Antonio Manetti, whose drawings survive. Manetti was a Florentine, while Vellutello hailed from Lucca, Florence's longtime rival—a possible motivating factor. In the sixteenth century, such calculations were taken seriously as attempts to reconcile scripture with objective reasoning. Mathematician and science historian Mark Peterson has argued that Galileo's calculations of Dante's non-Euclidean, topology-curved universe laid the basis for mathematical physics. Galileo's lectures at the Florentine Academy led to his appointment as a mathematics lecturer at the University of Pisa. The article was written by Colin Marshall, based in Seoul, and published on Open Culture.