Death of Giordano Bruno (1600) — Burned for Infinite Worlds

On February 17, 1600, the philosopher and mathematician Giordano Bruno was burned alive in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. His crime included the belief that the universe is infinite, that the stars are distant suns each with their own planetary systems, and that space has no centre. These were not merely theological heresies — they were mathematical ones. A finite universe had a centre, a geometry, a structure that could be described. An infinite universe has no centre, no edge, no preferred direction. Bruno's infinity was not the mathematical infinity of Cantor (which lay 300 years ahead) but it prefigured the same question: can we reason rigorously about the infinite?