1 Carlo Pucci, mathematician and citizen

Carlo Pucci passed away in Florence on 10 January 2003, in the house where he was born, in Viale Volta 105, following a long illness borne with stoic determination. He remained lucid until his final days, and from his sickbed continued to concern himself with the mathematical community and the conservation of the memoirs of the movement Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty). The non-religious funeral service was held in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Florence, and he was buried in the Trespiano cemetery, just a short distance from the tomb of the Rosselli brothers. The intellectual genealogy of Pucci is related on one side to the great mathematical school of Enrico Betti, Ulisse Dini and Luigi Bianchi through his first maestro Giovanni Sansone, and on the other side to the democratic culture of the Italian Risorgimento: Pasquale Villari, Gaetano Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi.

Pucci (Fig. 1) was born in Florence on 3 August 1925. He was president of the Committee for Mathematics of the Consiglio Nazionale di Ricerca (CNR, the Italian National Council for Research), president of the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica (INdAM, the Italian National Institute of Higher Mathematics), president of the Unione Matematica Italiana (UMI, the Italian Mathematical Union), and professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Florence. Nephew of Ernesto Rossi and custodian of the archives of Gaetano Salvemini and his uncle, Carlo was appointed secretary of the committee for the publication of their works, and founded, through his personal behest, the Fondazione Ernesto Rossi-Gaetano Salvemini. His work during the period following World War II, as promoter of mathematical research and of new forms for its governance, was of fundamental importance for the development of the mathematical disciplines in Italy.

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Carlo Pucci (1925–2003)

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To honour the tenth anniversary of his death, a day-long seminar entitled “Carlo Pucci tra scienza e impegno civile”, organized by the University of Florence, the Italian Mathematical Union and the Fondazione Ernesto Rossi-Gaetano Salvemini and held in Florence on 24 May 2013, invited reflections on his scientific work and his efforts at organisation over the course of more than 40 years, and his untiring commitment, as a scientist and as a citizen, to the promotion of culture, whose points of reference were the ideals of justice and liberty and the practice of democratic mobilisation. In gathering the papers presented by speakers for publication, we believed it was preferable to follow the chronological order of the periods referred to, so that the result would be a kind of biography of Pucci by many hands. The volume that resulted is Carlo Pucci tra scienza e impegno civile (Fig. 2) edited by Alessandro Figà Talamanca and Luigi Pepe [3].

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Cover of the book Carlo Pucci tra scienza e impegno civile

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The volume opens with the lengthy chapter by Antonella Braga that discusses the Pucci family in the 1930s and examines the singular relationship that bound the young Carlo to his maternal uncle Ernesto Rossi, whom he met for the first time in the Roman prison of Regina Coeli, where Ernesto was being held for political reasons. Braga also discusses Carlo’s education, his literary tastes, his choice of university studies. At age 18, Carlo had an extraordinary experience with Ernesto, visiting various member of the anti-Fascist movement during the bombing of northern Italy in the summer of 1943. Carlo left several typed memoirs of this experience, which were printed.

This is followed by the recollections of two mathematicians who shared Pucci’s Roman sojourn in the 1950s. Edoardo Vesentini presents his valuable testimony of a study program that led to a shared feeling about the necessity of the internationalisation of Italian mathematics, as well as the elaboration of new and more open forms of recruiting researchers and support for research activities. Gianfranco Capriz recalls instead the first developments of electronic calculation in Italy, which saw Carlo and Ernesto “facilitated” by a public investment in the field of new computers with the support of Luigi Einaudi, then President of the Italian Republic. Next is a collection of letters exchanged between Pucci and Alessandro Figà Talamanca regarding the period of the latter’s studies in America and then various university experiences up through the 1980s. This concerns what might be defined for mathematics as “the first brain homecoming”, where a period of training abroad is followed by insertion in the Italian university system.

Two contributions, among the most outstanding in the volume, regard Pucci’s role in the context of the Committee for Mathematics in the Italian National Council for Research and the Italian Mathematical Union. Alessandro Figà Talamanca presents the legislative framework of the CNR after 1945 and Pucci’s work as president of the Committee for Mathematics from 1968 to 1976. Noteworthy within this context are the training programs for future mathematicians, the inquiries into the new possibilities of use of mathematics in schools, research and industry, the basic national program of study, the summer introductory courses to mathematical research, the strengthening of the lines of study regarding applications within the mathematics degree course, the funding of research and national research groups, the defense of the independence of the scientific community. This is followed by an analysis of Pucci’s positions regarding special programs and projects carried out, his disputes with the Committee for Physical Sciences, and regarding space research and his fight against the transformation of the CNR into a government-controlled body.

Salvatore Coen’s chapter about Pucci and the Union of Italian Mathematicians (UMI) begins with the Naples congress of 1959, during which Pucci, who had then recently returned from a period of research in the United States, was engaged in promoting new forms of organisation of the mathematical community and different and more transparent forms of managing funding for research. Pucci, tenaciously pursuing this strategy, knew how to use on one hand the pre-existing organisation of the UMI, and on the other, and a new form of association: the Associazione Sindacale Ricercatori di Matematica (ASRM), of which he was the heart and soul as well as one of the founders. Naturally he was not alone in this demanding program, and found the consensus on one side from older professors such as Francesco Giacomo Tricomi and Lucio Lombardo Radice, but could count above all on the support of a new generation of mathematicians, including Giovanni Prodi, Enrico Magenes, Guido Stampacchia, Ennio De Giorgi, and others. Thus was born the Collegio Nazionale per la Ricerca Matematica (CONARM), which functioned as a agency for the funding of mathematical research with respect to the CNR and the large public utility, ENI. The role of the CONARM and the ASRM vanished when the Committee for Mathematics of the CNR and the UMI adopted the program as their own. Coen’s work then discusses Pucci’s role in the Scientific Committee of the UMI and his presidency of that society from 1976 to 1982, concluding with an account of his activities in the UMI, which continued until almost the very end of his days.

A brief chapter by Vincenzo Ancona, president of the INdAM, recounts Pucci’s fight for publication of the proceedings and the joint efforts of Pucci and Vesentini to strengthen the institute.

Ciro Ciliberto, current president of the UMI, goes beyond an institutional account and examines two critical phases of the organisation of mathematical research in Italy: 1959, the year that Pucci’s program began, and the years of his presidency of the INdAM, marked by conflicts with the new generations of mathematicians.

Luigi Pepe then illustrates the role played by Pucci in the revival of studies in the history of mathematics in Italy. Having attended the lectures of Eugenio Garin and Gaetano Salvemini as a young man, he had an uncommon sense of the importance of the history of science, and as a Florentine he had a genuine fondness for the Italian language in conjunction with the great advances of scientific English. A testimony to this is the beginning of publication, during his presidency of the UMI, of the series Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche in 1981; further testimony is the collection of the works of the great mathematicians.

As mentioned, Pucci was the custodian of the archives of Ernesto Rossi and Gaetano Salvemini, which he conserved with care and put at the disposal of scholars. The Salvemini archive is now conserved and catalogued at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana, while the Rossi archive is conserved in the Historical Archives of the European Union–HAEU, both in Florence. Both archives are overseen by the Committee for the publication of the works of Gaetano Salvemini and the Fondazione Ernesto Rossi-Gaetano Salvemini.

After his studies in Rome, his period in the United States, and his university teaching in Catania and Genoa, Carlo Pucci returned to Florence, where he had received his degree in 1949. Giuseppe Anichini describes Pucci as a professor in Florence, with particular emphasis on his commitment during the turbulent years of student protests in the Faculty of Architecture. At the time he was almost alone in his opposition the reigning demagogy that voted in favour of cancelling the requirements of the courses of mathematics.

The volume concludes with the essay by Giorgio Talenti, Pucci’s first research student in Rome, who remained close to him for the entire arc of his academic career. Talenti provides a portrait of Pucci as a professor and researcher in the celebrated Humboldtian style, which considered good didactics to be inseparable from research activities. During the conference Talenti presented Pucci’s book, published posthumously, Istituzioni di analisi superiore [6], as well as the bibliography of Pucci’s works, Pubblicazioni matematiche di Carlo Pucci.

While there are by now numerous studies on mathematics and scientific institutes in Italy between the two World Wars, there is still little systematic research on that topic concerning the second half of the century. The most important contributions regarding institutional aspects are [5, 7, 8]. However, this type of work, though indispensable, is often limited to presenting the facts that appear in the official minutes while hardly ever bringing to light the true motivations behind the deliberations. Thus even studies of a biographical nature and the recollections of the protagonists, such as the ones contained in this volume dedicated to Pucci, can make a valuable contribution fo our knowledge of the history of Italian cultural institutions in the field of mathematics in the second half of the twentieth century, where much work remains to be done.

Translated from the Italian by Kim Williams