Rossana Tazzioli

• PhD Mathematics
• Professor at University of Lille

Les 81 lettres d'Eugenio Beltrami (1835-1900) à Charles Hermite (1822-1901), qui font l'objet de notre étude, couvrent la période qui va de 1878 à 1899 et sont actuellement conservées au « Fondo Ulisse Dini », Archives de la Scuola Normale Superiore de Pise. A l'époque, Hermite enseignait l'Algèbre supérieure à la Sorbonne et Beltrami occupait la c...

This paper concerns late 1920 s attempts to construct unitary theories of gravity and electromagnetism. A first attempt using a non-standard connection—with torsion and zero-curvature—was carried out by Albert Einstein in a number of publications that appeared between 1928 and 1931. In 1929, Tullio Levi-Civita discussed Einstein’s geometric structu...

The Italian Mathematical Union (UMI) celebrates its centenary this year. It was indeed set up in 1922 in accordance with a motion approved in Brussels in July 1919 by the International Research Council, which promoted the creation of national scientific committees. The national and international background of this event is very problematic in vario...

The Unione Matematica Italiana (Italian Mathematical Union, UMI) was created according to a motion approved in Brussels in July 1919 by the International Research Council, which promoted the creation of national scientific committees. The recent reorganization of the UMI Archive has made significant documents available to science historians. By usi...

This book is a consequence of the international meeting organized in Marseilles in November 2018 devoted to the aftermath of the Great War for mathematical communities. It features selected original research presented at the meeting offering a new perspective on a period, the 1920s, not extensively considered by historiography. After 1918, new cou...

L'unité des Mathématiques en perspectives présentées dans cet ouvrage est bien réelle et reflète l’immense culture de Rudolf Bkouche (1934-2016), mathématicien et historien des mathématiques de Lille. Les auteurs du présent ouvrage, spécialistes de mathématiques, d’histoire des mathématiques (de l’Antiquité au XXe siècle) ou d’épistémologie, provie...

Dans cet article nous présentons une lettre d’Ettore Bortolotti (secrétaire de l’Union Mathématique Italienne) à Henri Fehr (Vice-Président de l’Union Mathématique Internationale) du 12 juin 1928. Cette lettre clarifie le contexte international de l’organisation du Congrès International des Mathématiciens qui a eu lieu à Bologne en septembre 1928.

The present book contains the voluminous correspondence exchanged between the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler and his younger Italian colleague Vito Volterra spanning a period of almost forty years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The relationship between the two men is remarkable for both personal and scientif...

Le but de notre article est de montrer les véritables préoccupations de Beltrami quand il créa la « représentation réelle » du plan de Lobachevskij-Bolyai suivie par sa construction concrète, ainsi que le rôle qu’elles ont joué dans sa recherche et pour la diffusion de la géométrie non euclidienne.

The recent reorganization of the Historical Archive of the Italian Mathematical Union (UMI) has made available to scholars a considerable multitude of documents that shed new light on some aspects of the history of the Union, on its relationships with other national and international institutions, and on the increasing connections with the Fascist...

The Archives of the Unione Matematica Italiana (Italian Mathematical Union, UMI), located at the Dipartimento di Matematica of the Bologna University, has been recently reorganized and will be soon opened to scholars. It consists of two parts: a historical covering the period from 1921 to the mid-fifties, and a modern part reaching from 1967 until...

In 1884, Giovan Battista Guccia founded first the Circolo Matematico di Palermo and then some years later its journal, the Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo. Although historians of mathematics have published a number of works on the Circolo and the Rendiconti, there are very few systematic studies on mathematics in Sicilian periodicals....

Before the First World War, Tullio Levi-Civita (1873–1941) was already a well-known mathematician in Italy and abroad, in particular in France. Professor at the University of Padua since 1898, he had published important contributions to tensor calculus, theory of relativity, differential geometry, hydrodynamics, and the three-body problem. In 1918,...

Tullio Levi-Civita (1871–1943), professor at the University of Rome from 1918 onwards, was a prominent Italian mathematician of the first part of the 20th century. He gave remarkable contributions to various mathematical fields, such as general relativity, the three-body problem, differential geometry, and hydrodynamics.

The somewhat grandiloquent words of the previous poem, written by the French writer Jean Aicard (1848–1921), area tribute to the visit of the Italian sovereigns to Paris, an important diplomatic event organized in 1904 to mark the rapprochement between Paris and Rome.

The contributions in this proceedings volume offer a new perspective on the mathematical ties between France and Italy, and reveal how mathematical developments in these two countries affected one another. The focus is above all on the Peninsula’s influence on French mathematicians, counterbalancing the historically predominant perception that Fren...

In this paper, we present a general overview of the involvement of Italian mathematicians in World War I, with a special look at the cases of Volterra and Picone, and considerations about the difficult post-war situation in Italy, with its opposing desires for retribution on the one hand and internationalism on the other.

Here we provide a selection of writings and quotes by Italian mathematicians, who recount in their own words their experiences as mathematicians during the Great War. Two historic writings texts in particular, respectively by Mauro Picone and Alessandro Terracini, are presented in their entirety in the appendices.

The book by Bottazzini and Nastasi focusses on Italian mathematicians and their role in the political and social life of the Risorgimento, analysing their activities on one hand as members of a scientific community and on the other hand as individuals with different and sometimes conflicting political ideals, social relations, projects and specifi...

In Italy, the decade 1914-1924 was a period of important changes - the polemics about the intervention in World War I (1914-1915), the outbreak of the war (1915-1918), the hard post-war social tensions and the beginning of fascism. The mathematical community was certainly involved in these events. The majority of Italian mathematicians were in favo...

The two volumes of the Dizionario biografico delle scienziate italiane include the biographies of more than a hundred women scientists and provide an idea of the difficulties that women scientists encountered in different periods of Italian history.

In 1899, Ivar Fredholm discovered how to treat an integral equation using conceptual methods from linear algebra and use these ideas to solve certain classes of boundary value problems. He formulated a theory allowing him both to unify large classes of problems and to attack several problems fruitfully. The historical literature on the theory of in...

Several cases illustrating the complicated relations between mathematicians and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries are presented in the book.

Eugenio Beltrami was a prominent figure of nineteenth century Italian mathematics. He was also involved in the social, cultural and political events of his country. This paper aims at throwing fresh light on some aspects of Beltrami’s life and work by using his personal correspondence. Unfortunately, Beltrami’s Archive has never been found, and onl...

Come è noto, molti matematici contribuirono in prima persona al Risorgimento italiano e la loro opera per la costruzione di una identità nazionale, culturale e politica, e come scrive Cremona, “pel lustro della Scienza italiana e pel progresso dell'alto insegnamento”, continuò anche dopo l'Unità. Varie sono le direzioni in cui si esplicò la loro o...

Joseph Pérès (1890–1962) was a singular case among the French mathematicians who have experienced the troubled years of WW1. For almost every young man of his generation, the war became a key moment whose consequences have influenced them during their whole life. The war had been fatal for Gateaux. It left its permanent mark on Julia, horribly woun...

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Italy decided to remain neutral. Italy entered the war only on 24 May 1915, and the aim of the present section is to explain what happened in Italy in the interval.

In 1914, when the First World War broke out, Volterra was Senator – he was elected in 1905 – and was one of the more influential Italian scholars. He had published important works in several fields of mathematics and physics. He had introduced the fundamental idea of functional, and proved fundamental results in functional analysis. Volterra had al...

In this introductory section, we wish to present a quick and parallel picture of the situation in both countries just before the war broke out.

A central figure of French propaganda in Italy during the war was the historian Julien Luchaire (1876–1962). He was a professor of Italian literature at the University of Grenoble and a prominent specialist of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote his memoirs, Confessions d’un françcais moyen [37]. The book gives an exceptional insight of this period i...

This book is obviously not the place to give a full portrait of Volterra and his French colleagues. They are too huge and complex scientific personalities for that. The collected works of each of them have been published in [8,27,47] and [57]. Information about their lives can be gathered from various sources, such as the numerous obituaries which...

As seen from a letter sent by Hada mard to Volterra on 3 April 1916, there was then an urgent need of propaganda directed towards the American Jews to convince them to relinquish their pro-German feelings. The reaction of the Jewish communities in World War 1 is a not so widely known question, though it has been studied by several authors.

As was seen in ♥ 9, the French propaganda during the war often used the various means of cultural exchanges between the two countries. These exchanges expanded rapidly during the decade immediately preceding the war. The desire was to act on several sectors of cultural and academic life: travels of professors and students, journals based on the coo...

J'ai étée très sensible à votre souvenir que m'a transmis M.Appell . L'attitude de l'Italie est une des raisons objectives que nous avons de penser que nous défendons la cause de la civilisation, de la liberté et du droit, ce qui nous donnera la force de lutter jusqu'au bout, sans nous laisser abattre par aucune épreuve, car le temps assurera forcé...

Between 28 and 30 September 1973, an important conference was held at the university of Grenoble (France) under the title France and Italy during World War 1. The proceedings of the conference were subsequently published by Grenoble University Press in [25]. The conference gathered important contributions about many aspects of the Franco-Italian re...

Levi-Civita made important contributions to hydrodynamics: he solved D'Alembert's paradox, introduced the "wake hypothesis", deduced the general inte-gral of any plane motion involving a wake, and gave a rigorous proof of the existence of the irrotational wave in a canal of finite depth. In this paper, we investigate Levi-Civita's results in this a...

Tullio Levi-Civita was one of the most important Italian mathematicians in the early part of the 20th century, contributing significantly to a number of research fields in mathematics and physics. In addition, he was involved in the social and political life of his time and suffered severe political and racial persecution during the period of Fasci...

Tullio Levi-Civita was one of the most important Italian mathematicians of the first part of the 20th century, contributing significantly to a number of research fields in mathematics and physics. In addition, he was involved in the social and political life of his time and suffered severe political and racial persecution during the period of Fasci...

Many XIXth century «geometers»—such as Bernhard Riemann, Hermann von Helmholtz, Felix Klein, Riccardo De Paolis, Mario Pieri, Henri Poincaré, Federigo Enriques, and others—played an important role in the discussion about the foundations of mathematics. But in contrast to Euclid's ideas, they did not simply identify “physical space» with the «space...

Many questions in mathematical physics lead to a solution in terms of a harmonic function in a closed region with given continuous boundary values. This problem is known as Dirichlet's problem, whose solution is based on an existence principle—the so-called Dirichlet's principle. However, in the second half of the 19th century many mathematicians d...

Differential parameters play a relevant role in Beltrami's mathematical work. They are employed in different contexts, in order to express some well-known results in a new way and to extend potential theory and the theory of elasticity to a Riemannian manifold. The author aims to show that differential parameters enabled Beltrami to solve many math...

We publish seventeen letters by Eugenio Beltrami to Ernesto Cesàro, which are dated from 1883 until 1900. They are about academic and scientific questions. Beltrami communicated many of Cesàro's memoirs to the “Accademia dei Lincei” or the “Istituto Lombarde di Scienze e Lettere”, and often gave him suggestions for his books and papers in these let...

We find Lamé again, an other pupill of the “Ecole polytechnique” who considers again the analogy between the catenary and the thin vault stable under its own weight He improve the famous work of Coulomb who applies the theory of maximis and minimis to Architecture. Le scientific biography that follows shows a scientist who has been interrested in c...

Analyse detaillee des travaux de Beltrami sur la theorie mathematique de l'elasticite et du potentiel, dans un espace non-eucledien, dans le but de donner une explication mecanique aux phenomenes physiques

title> SUMMARY The aim of many eighteenth century «natural philosophers» - cartesians, leibnizians and newtonians - was to formulate a theory able to explain the propagation of physical phenomena. They conceived the universe as being filled with an incompressible fluid (ether) whose deformations allowed for the transmission of forces through spaces...

[ SUMMARY The aim of many eighteenth century «natural philosophers» - cartesians, leibnizians and newtonians - was to formulate a theory able to explain the propagation of physical phenomena. They conceived the universe as being filled with an incompressible fluid (ether) whose deformations allowed for the transmission of forces through spaces. The...

This paper sets out to examine some of Riemann's papers and notes left byhim, in the light of the "philosophical" standpoint expounded in his writings on Naturphilosophie. There is some evidence that manyof Riemann's works, including his Habilitationsvortrag of 1854 on the foundations of geometry, may have sprung from his attempts to find a unified...

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Riemann made fundamental contributions to math- ematics {number theory, dierential geometry, real and complex analysis, Abelian functions, dierential equations, and topology{ and also carried out research in physics and natural philosophy. The aim of this note is to show that his works can be interpreted as a unitary programme where mathematics, ph...