It is that as a mathematician he discovered - alone and unaided - the binomial theory usually attributed to a famous English scholar called Isaac Newton.
The famous art historian and scholar Giorgio Vasari, writing in the second edition of his Lives of the Artists in 1568, mentioned that Pinturicchio's painting was "over the door of a room in the Apostolic Palace".
The Duchess hated books ("Quelle dread surprise, " she writes upon learning that a famous French writer is coming to dinner), while Fermor was the very definition of the dashing, encyclopedic gypsy scholar.