Biography:Attilio Palatini
Attilio Palatini | |
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| Born | 18 November 1889 Treviso, Italy |
| Died | 24 August 1949 (aged 59) Rome, Italy |
| Alma mater | University of Padua |
| Known for | Palatini identity Calculus of variations Palatini variation |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral advisor | Tullio Levi-Civita |
Attilio Palatini (18 November 1889 – 24 August 1949) was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso.[1][2]
Biography
Palatini was the seventh of the eight children of Michele (1855-1914) and Ilde Furlanetto (1856-1895). In 1900, during the celebrations for the election of his father to Parliament, he was blinded by a young man from Treviso, losing the use of one eye. He completed his secondary studies in Treviso. He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the University of Padua, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita.
He taught rational mechanics at the Universities of Messina, Parma and Pavia. He was mainly involved in absolute differential calculus and in general relativity. Within this latter subject he gave a sound generalization of the variational principle.
In 1919, Palatini wrote an important article where he proposed a new approach to the variational formulation of Einstein's gravitational field equations.[3] In the same paper, Palatini also showed that the variations of Christoffel symbols constitute the coordinate components of a tensor.
He wrote the "Rational Mechanics" and "Theory of relativity" entries for the Hoepli Encyclopedia of Elementary mathematics.
See also
Notes
- ↑ An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini in Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana online.
- ↑ Serini, Rocco (1949). "Necrologio di Attilio Palatini" (in Italian). Bollettino dell'Unione Matematica Italiana. 3 4 (3): 334–335.
- ↑ "Deduzione invariantiva delle equazioni gravitazionali dal principio di Hamilton" (in Italian), Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo, 1 43: 203–212, 1919, doi:10.1007/BF03014670
External links
- Attilio Palatini at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini in Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana online.
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