On February 17, 1600, a man was stripped, his tongue clamped in a wooden vice, and burned alive in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno in Nola in 1548, was a Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who imagined a universe with no center and no edge, filled with countless suns and planets, decades before the telescope. This episode traces how a boy from southern Italy became a wandering genius, a relentless provocateur, and a symbol of free thought.

We cover his famed art of memory and the memory wheels he demonstrated for Pope Pius V, the banned Erasmus books hidden in a monastery latrine, his flight in 1576, the fight he picked in Calvinist Geneva, royal patronage under Henry III, and his most fertile years in London, including the ship's-mast argument for a moving Earth and the theory that he spi ...