Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#34: Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253)

Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253) was an English scientist, statesman, Bishop and philosopher who, along with a handful of others between 1200-1300, helped to reintroduce a scientific worldview to Europe after being virtually absent for nearly a millennium.

Grosseteste was the first mathematician and physicist of his age, and he authored scientific works involving meteorology, light, color and optics.

Grosseteste also wrote a number of commentaries on Aristotle which were influential for centuries. Grosseteste was one of the first in Europe to understand Aristotle's approach to scientific reasoning: generalizing from particular observations into a universal law, and then back again from universal laws to prediction of particulars. And Grosseteste believed that both paths must be verified by experimentation.

Grosseteste laid the basic framework for the proper methods of science. Generations of scientists after him would build upon these methods, ultimately leading to modern science, the discipline which has improved, and even made possible, the lives of billions of people worldwide.



Go to #35: Thomas Paine


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