Joaquín Velázquez de León (1732-1786), astronomer of New Spain

A Mexican-born astronomer who taught himself mathematics after finding neither professor nor books nor instruments at his college, learned indigenous languages and the reading of Aztec glyphs from an Indian teacher before he read Newton, built his own telescopes, corrected an error of longitude that had misplaced California for centuries, observed the transit of Venus of 1769 from a plank observatory, and drew the plans that created the mining tribunal and school of Mexico.