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S i d e b a r
Society of Jesus Was a Society of Scientists
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This Rock
Volume 17, Number 1
 January 2006 
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In the sciences, the Jesuits in particular distinguished themselves; some thirty-five craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians. When in the nineteenth-century Charles Bossut assembled a list of the 300 most significant mathematicians from the period from 900 B.C. through 1800 A.D., 5 percent of them were Jesuits. Even though the Jesuits were around for only two of those centuries, this single order of Catholic priests supplied the world with one out of twenty of its greatest mathematicians in 2,700 years.
A recent history of the Society of Jesus explains that by the eighteenth century the Jesuits: had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics—all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents (Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, HarperCollins, 189). Seismology, the study of earthquakes, had been so dominated by the Society of Jesus that it became known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J. B. Macelwane, who in 1936 wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.
The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science to such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less-developed nations, not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the nineteenth century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate timekeeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography. In Central and South America, the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.
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