Today in the history of astronomy, one the last great polymaths of the Renaissance is born. Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher's book Iter extaticum coeleste features an illustration of possible cosmological models. Credit: Linda Hall Library Frequently described as “the last man who knew everything,” 17th-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher was a true polymath. Born May 2, 1601, in Germany, Kircher relocated to Italy and the Roman College by the 1630s, fleeing the Thirty Years’ War. There he began a lifetime of research and publication in an impressively wide array of fields: from medicine to Egyptology, from music to theology, from linguistics to cartography and more.  Kircher contributed to astronomy through his studies of Earth as a planet – he famously lowered himself into the crater of Mount Vesuvius to take measurements not long after its 1631-32 eruption, and studied the magnetism of Earth’s poles.…