1010 years after the death of Gerbert d’Aurillac, in Veterinaria Digitial we want to recover the memory of their studies, although are ancient, about the brain running, a theme that was treated in the numbers 3, 13, 17, 28 and 30 of this blog.

Gerbert was born in the year 945 in Aurillac, in the Occitan mountains of Auverina. During the first years of their life was shepherd and in 963 joined, under the auspices of Ramon de Rodez, to the Benedictine monastery of St. Gerald of Aurillac. There was formed in the Trivium discipline (grammar, rhetoric and dialectics) and in 967,  he travelled with Ledgarda, Ramon’s daughter, until Santa Maria de Ripoll in Giron where he acquired the Quadrivium formation (arithmetics, geometry, astronomy and music). In the year 968, he travelled to Cordoba to improve the knowledge about Arab science, specially mathematics and astronomy and in 969 travelled to Rome where he met the roman-germanic emperor Oton I and with their son, later Oton II emperor, whom was his pupil.

To Gerbert d’Aurillac we owe their knowledge about psychology, music and mathematics, that were far in advance of their time.

In psicology, applied the knowledge of their celtic origin in the study of the conscience, unconsciousness and about the brain running expressed in his work “About the rational and about the use of the reason” that today we can consider as a psicologic treaty about the inhibition of brain neocortex. 

In the musical field, designed and built a new versión of the cord instrument called monochord. It is consisted by resonance box, a chord, a fix support for the chord and a mobile support that when it moves results in the different scales related to the mathematics proportions. 

The Gerbert’s abacus, antecedent of current calculators, introduced in Europe the zero number and the arab decimal system, the incorporation of the pendulum and the toothed wheels that allow him to invent a new type of clock, are  direct contributions to mathematics and physics.

Finally for the writing, he updated the “annotations tironianae”, due to Marco Tulio Tiron, an alphabet consisted by symbols that can be considered the antecessor of the current shorthand and that allows save time in writing.

Gerbert d’Aurillac can be considered one of the firsts european multidisciplinary scientifics and precursor of Renaissance's scientifics (as Leonardo da Vinci, Tycho Brahe, Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johan Kepler) althought is historically more known as Sylvester II.