Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (August 15, 1645 - August 22, 1700) was a Mexican priest and polymath, hailed as the 'da Vinci Mexicano.' He was one of the first, noted, great intellectuals born in the Americas. He was born in Mexico City, and was taught mathematics and astronomy by his father Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Benito, who had tutored the royal family back in Spain. At the age of 15 he entered the Society of Jesus, but this did not last: his breaches of Jesuit discipline, and repeated nighttime escapes from the cloister, led to his expulsion from the order. He was thereafter never secure: his life was a constant struggle to support himself and his family, and many of his works were produced only in manuscript, as he could not afford to publish them. He did study at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, as a mathematician and scientist. There, he won a faculty position in Astrology by sheer moxie, despite neither respecting the discipline, nor having a relevant degree. He cannot have been a good professor to study under: his constant hustle had the inevitable result that he seldom appeared in the classroom. He even published a 1681 manifesto against the notion that comets might be linked to worldly disasters; an indication that Sigüenza had greater interest in astronomy than astrology. His references on the subject - including Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes - drew criticism from more religiously orthodox scholars, such as Eusebio Kino. In the 1680s he made the first map of New Spain produced by a Mexican, and a hydrologic map of the Valley of Mexico. These were well received, resulting in his being named Royal Geographer for the colony in 1692. In this capacity, he took part in an expedition to Pensacola Bay, Florida, producing a chart of the bay and the mouth of the Mississippi. But of the six maps he is known to have made, only four have survived. He also studied Mexico's indigenous past, going as far as learning the Nahuatl language, and collecting indigenous manuscripts and codices. He contributed to the writings surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe, including a purported codex supporting her 1531 apparition. Sigüenza took a variety of other positions in addition to his dubious professorship: notably, his posting as chaplain of the Hospital del Amor de Dios and Chief Almoner. He wrote nonfiction, poetry, and historical works; he published an almanac beginning in 1671, which survived him by a year. He published in 1690 Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez which was thought to be America's first novel until modern scholarship revealed the fantastic tale of a Puerto Rican's captivity by English pirates to be an actual historical narrative. He left university in 1694, retiring to spend more time on financial constraints and personal ill health. He lost several of his more lucrative posts, having to become a censor for the inquisition, requiring much time reading with little opportunity for side hustles. His last years were painful ones, and he requested that he be autopsied after his death to determine what the cause of his suffering had been. The culprit: massive kidney stone.