Abstract
Young Vito, student at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, graduated in physics in 1882 with a thesis on hydrodynamics written under the advisement of Enrico Betti. Other graduates from the Scuola Normale in the 1880s included Salvatore Pincherle, Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, Luigi Bianchi, Carlo Somigliana and Mario Pieri, and later, in the 1890s, Federigo Enriques, Gaetano Scorza and Guido Fubini. Each one of these is a ‘luminary’ in the history of mathematics, and they provide excellent testimony to the level of the Scuola Normale. In the previous chapter, we mentioned the teaching faculty that Volterra found when he enrolled in the Scuola Normale. Above all, it was Dini and Betti who provided the orientation for his early choices. They also contributed to making Pisa a major centre for Italian mathematics, which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, would generally be acknowledged as third in the ideal ranking of mathematics by country, after France and Germany. This is a significant achievement for a mathematics that had essentially begun from scratch, in 1860, at the time of Italian unification!
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- 1.
The letter is quoted in M. Berengo, Cultura e instituzioni nell’Ottocento italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004).
- 2.
The quote appears in a letter from Pascal to the mathematics historian Federico Amodeo, dated 23 November 1887, published in Dalla “Moderna Geometria” alla “Nuova Geometria Italiana” Viaggiando per Napoli, Torino e dintorni. Lettere Di: Sannia, Segre, Peano, Castelnuovo, D’Ovidio, Del Pezzo, Pascal e Altri a Federico Amodeo, Franco and Nicla Palladino, eds. (Florence: Olshki, 2006).
- 3.
See the essay by Lars Gårding, ‘History of the Mathematics of Double Refraction’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 40, 4 (1989): pp. 355–385.
- 4.
Vito Volterra, ‘Funzioni di linee, equazioni integrali e integro-differenziabilii’, Anales de la Sociadad Cientifica Argentina, 1921.
- 5.
Vito Volterra, ‘Sopra le funzioni che dipendono da altre funzioni’, Rendiconti Accademia dei Lincei 4, 3 (1887): pp. 97–105, 141–146 and 153–158.
- 6.
Vito Volterra, ‘Sur une généralisation de la théorie des fonctions d’une variable imaginaire’, Acta Mathematica 12 (1889): pp. 233–286.
- 7.
Jacques Hadamard, The Mathematician’s Mind: Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 130 (1st ed., 1945).
- 8.
Maurice Fréchet, ‘Sur quelques points du calcul fonctionnel’, Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo 22, 1 (1906): pp. 1–72.
- 9.
On the reasons that led – at least on the level of terminology – to the collocation of Volterra’s contribution in second place, see one of Angelo Guerraggio’s two ‘updates’ of Carl Boyers classic text, Storia del Calcolo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007).
- 10.
Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, Francis Maitland, trans. (London: Thomas Nelson and Son, 1914), p. 68.
- 11.
Vito Volterra, ‘Henri Poincaré’, Griffith Conrad Evans, trans. The Rice Institute Pamphlet Volume Four (Houston: Rice Institute, 1915), pp. 133–162; quotes from pp. 134, 138.
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Guerraggio, A., Paoloni, G. (2012). Professor in Pisa. In: Vito Volterra. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27263-9_2
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