New Da Vinci bio portrays a man obsessed with knowledge, impossible to know

There is nowhere stated: reason for this article is to promote the book sale.

Knowing true reason/motivtion of somebody's actions is important. You can also draw conclusions if somebody is hiding their true motivation under pretext.

It's a bit like the portrayal of Steve Jobs. Sure, I can read testimonies about how he was an asshole - but how would I know for sure?

I think Einstein's perceived humility was mostly a consequence of the fact that he was mostly right on everything he said, and people quickly acknowledged as much. Relativity overtook aether theory shockingly quickly for instance. There's the old quote that science progresses one funeral at a time. The meaning there being that people tend to obstinately hold onto past beliefs, so it is frequent that it takes the passing of one generation for progress to be effectively made by another. One of his only views that was not widely accepted was that of his view of quantum mechanics - and that's where his snidery started to emerge. But in other cases having your revolutionary ideas rapidly and universally adopted is going to make it rather easier to speak softly knowing your big stick is certainly up to task. And that's probably one too many quotes for a single post...

It's not difficult to come to opinion when you work with programmers :-)

An example being, each time you would make a slight pause in your sentence, than a comma is required, otherwise you would keep writing until a sentence has ended with a period, or as I was originally taught, a full colon.

Sometimes using a more formal tone in writing can be a nice change, and give an article a more through out perview from the reader.

Unfortunately I haven't taken the time to read multiple biographies to try to put his books into reasonable context. My comment is an attempt at getting someone who may have to weigh in.

Of course, that literature was not originally in Latin, and had to be translated. Where and when was it translated? In great part, in Toledo, Spain after the fall of Al-Andalus.

e.g: Nicolaus Copernicus started his studies using almanacs and tables such as the Alfonsine tables, the tables were originally in Arabic and were collected/translated by Alfonso X of Castile in Toledo. They included observations ranging from the days of Ptolomy onwards. Without that, Copernicus could not have done what he did.

St. Albertus Magnus, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, studied the works of Aristotle, commented by Averroes, translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin. Without that, St. Thomas Aquinas' works on philosophy and everything based on that would not exist.

Many Western discoveries came from innovations in optics (e.g: telescope, microscope). The foundation from that in great part can be credited to the Islamic empire. They experimented with reflection, refraction, lenses, etc... and that is original work with literature to support it.

There is of course much more but I don't really have the time to go through all that, e.g: numerals, medicine, trade, etc.

So, wrapping up, without their influence this is what would have happened: no scientific method, no real philosophy and/or theology, unsafe medicine, no microscope, no telescope, using ridiculous impractical numerals... a scientific setback worth hundreds of years. Today you would be at best in the middle of the first industrial revolution.

Additionally, the major change people usually aren't aware of was the spread of papermaking knowledge through Europe around the 12th and 13th century. Before that point, most books were created on Parchment, which was much more expensive. I've read somewhere that a single bible took ~3000 sheep to produce.

If you struggle, you can ask your highly educated peers (<1% of literacy at the time) to provide some help, or you ask the scientific elite at the time, a bunch of theocratic fanatics that would prosecute you, torture you and burn you alive along with all your findings as soon as you publish them.

Stop hoarding the credit. The Reinassance wasn't a self-emergent phenomenon. It required external influence to happen and that is factual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...

Philosophy changed that, and you might want to take a look at where that philosophy came from, who translated it and when.