III. The Teaching in Italy

Abstract

In Italy, we note another highly characteristic development that reveals quite different patterns than those in England and France; in their typical forms it can at the extreme be placed in parallel with Méray. I want to concern myself only with modern Italy from about 1860 onwards. The greatest influence on the uniform restructuring of mathematics teaching in the then newly unified state was Luigi Cremona, the same person whom you all know for his scientific importance in the development of modern geometry; actually, he is the founder of the independent algebraic-geometrical research in Italy, which has provided such excellent results. Due to his scientific activity, Cremona has exerted a lasting impact on higher education, by connecting projective geometry with descriptive geometry and graphical statics. Engineers everywhere in the world speak today of Cremona’s force diagram, and if this name may be historically unjustified, it shows clearly Cremona’s great influence.