Abstract
The 1890s opened with the important new phase of the transfer to Torino. We don’t know exactly what the reasons were that led Volterra to leave the University of Pisa, where not only had he received his training, but where he had also been given a chair at a very young age. To be sure, the desire to ‘liberate’ himself from the watchful eyes of those who were by then his colleagues, but had just a few years earlier had been his teachers, must have played a role. It is easy to imagine that Professor Volterra, within the Faculty of Sciences, was still the young Volterra to the many older chair-holders who had known him when he was only 18 or 19 years old.
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Notes
- 1.
The texts of these opening lectures are contained in the second of the three volumes of Giovanni Vailati Scritti, edited by Mario Quaranta (Bologna: Forni editori, 1987).
- 2.
V. Volterra, ‘Sulla inversione degli integrali definiti’, Atti Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 31 (1896): pp. 311–323, 400–408, 537–567 and 693–708.
- 3.
These movements of the poles ‘do not have anything to do with the motions proper to the terrestrial axis with respect to an inertial system of reference, which are the well-known motions of precession and nutation. Instead, these are to be seen in a system of reference that is conjoined to the earth, a system in which latitude is defined with reference to the equatorial plane perpendicular to the earth’s axis’, G. Puppi, ‘Vito Volterra e la fisica del suo tempo’, Atti del Convegno internazionale in memoria di Vito Volterra (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1992).
- 4.
From a letter of 24 January 1895 from Giovanni Schiaparelli to astronomer Francesco Porro.
- 5.
The dispute is recounted in greater detail in Angelo Guerraggio, ‘Le memorie di Volterra e Peano sul movimento dei poli’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 31 (1984), pp. 97–126.
- 6.
From a letter of 2 June 1895 from Volterra to Peano.
- 7.
The only ‘dissenting’ opinion was that of Beppo Levi (1875–1961), who had received his degree in Torino and whose teachers had included Segre, D’Ovidio, Peano and Volterra. Levi worked in real analysis, algebraic geometry, foundations of geometry, logic, and number theory. He taught in the universities of Cagliari, Parma and Bologna. In 1932, writing about Peano’s ideas and work in the Bollettino dell’ Unione matematico italiana, he arrived at maintaining what even Peano himself had dared not claim: ‘it was also Peano who provided one of the first and most notable examples with a fine series of papers … on the question of the displacement of the earth’s pole, which had become current in 1895–96 as a consequence of the so-called experiment of the cat, and of a happy parallel noted by Volterra between that experiment and the astronomical phenomenon’
- 8.
Much later, in 1938, Volterra published his Rotation des corps dans lesquels existent des mouvements internes (full title: Conférences sur quelques questions de mécanique et de physique mathématique: Rotation des corps dans lesquels existent des mouvements internes, Part 1, vol. 4 of Collection de physique mathématique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1938). At a distance of forty years from his first investigations of the subject, Volterra underlined their prevalently theoretical aspect: ‘il ne saurait être question de tirer d’une telle étude l’explication du mouvements du pôle’ (there can be no question of drawing from such a study an explanation of the movements of the pole). Volterra collaborated on this book with editor Pierre Costabel, who was later known primarily as a historian of science.
- 9.
For a history of the first international congresses of mathematicians, see Angelo Guerraggio and Pietro Nastasi, Roma 1908: il Congresso internazionale dei matematici (Torino: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2008).
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Guerraggio, A., Paoloni, G. (2012). The Cats of Torino. In: Vito Volterra. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27263-9_3
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