Bernardino Baldi
Bernardino Baldi (born June 5, 1553 in Urbino ; † October 10, 1617 ibid) was an Italian mathematician, poet and versatile scholar who left over 100 works. Because of its versatility, it has been called the “ Varro des Cinquecento ”.
Life
Baldi was first taught privately and then studied mathematics in Urbino from 1570 with Federico Commandino and, after his death in 1575, with Commandino's pupil Guidobaldo del Monte . In between he studied Greek at the University of Padua from 1573 until it was closed by the plague. He returned to Urbino where he was a student of Guidobaldo del Monte and in 1579 was brought to Mantua by the Duke of Gonzaga as court mathematician . There he wrote his multi-volume Dizionario vitruviano , which established his reputation. He spent some time with Cardinal Borromeo in Milan and then again in the service of the Duke of Mantua as abbot (1585) in the city of Guastalla near Mantua. There he wrote his biography of Federico Commandino (1587, published not until 1714), which was based on Commandino's own information, which he dictated to Baldi in the last years of his life. In 1601 he was commissioned by the Duke of Urbino to write the biography of Federico da Montefeltro and moved back to Urbino. It was published in Rome in 1824 in ten volumes. His biography of another Duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo I da Montefeltro , appeared in Milan in 1821. Most recently, he dealt with geography (unpublished).
His Vite de matematici with portraits of 201 mathematicians (from Thales von Milet to Christoph Clavius ) from antiquity to his time, a manuscript of around 2000 pages on which he worked for ten years, is considered the first history of mathematics. Even after its completion, he collected biographical material on mathematicians, which he published in a new edition Cronica de matematici with an additional 150 mathematicians (from Euphorbus to Guidobaldo del Monte). Both remained unpublished for a long time, the cronica appeared in Urbino in 1707 (editor Angelo Monticelli), parts of the Vite were published in Rome by Enrico Narducci in 1861, further parts appeared in the Bolletino published by Baldassare Boncompagni in 1879 and Narducci published further parts in the same journal in 1886 / 87.
He translated works of antiquity, for example, at Commandino's suggestion, the Automata by Heron of Alexandria into Italian (only published in 1589), with a history of mechanics by Baldi. He also translated the Phainomena des Aratos by Soloi , Book 8 of the Pappos Collection, and he wrote a commentary on the mechanics questions of Pseudo-Aristotle (completed after Stillman Drake 1589), his main contribution to mechanics (Stillman Drake). It appeared posthumously in 1621. In the commentary he developed, among other things, a treatment of mechanical equilibria with the concept of the center of gravity; he used it to analyze fracture configurations of vaults, for example. He was influenced by Commandino's translation of Pappos and the commentary on Archimedes' treatise on equilibria by Guido Ubaldo (both published in 1588). According to Pierre Duhem , he is said to have taken manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci as a source. The influence of the work, especially in overcoming Aristotelian mechanics and the link to Archimedes, is limited, according to Drake, by the late publication. A translation of Heron's Belopoeica into Latin appeared in 1616 with the Greek text and a Latin biography of Heron von Baldi.
He also wrote didactic poems about the invention of artillery and the nautical compass (unpublished). However, some of his poems were published during his lifetime.
Works
- Cronica de matematici overo Epitome dell 'istoria delle vite loro. Angelo Antonio Monticelli, Urbino 1707, digitized .
literature
- Stillman Drake : Baldi, Bernardino , Dictionary of Scientific Biography , 1971, Volume 1, p. 419
- Giovanni Ferraro: Bernardino Baldi e il recupero del pensiero tecnico-scientifico dell'antichità (= Mathemata. Vol. 1). dell'Orso, Alessandria 2008, ISBN 978-88-627-4080-7 .
- Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, pp. 357-358
- Paul L. Rose: Rediscovered manuscripts of the Vite de matematici and mathematical works by Bernardino Baldi (1553-1617), Rend.Accad.Naz. Lincei, Classe Sci. F sharp. Mat. E Nat., Volume 56, 1974, pp. 272-279 (with list of Baldi's manuscripts and publications)
- Bronislaw Bilinski: Prolegomena alle Vite de Matematici di Bernardino Baldi (1587–1596) , Accademia Polacca delle Scienze. Biblioteca e Centro di Studi a Roma, Conferenze e Studi, 71, 1977, pp. 1-135
- Erna Hilfstein: Bernardino Baldi and his two biographies of Copernicus , in: The Polish Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, (1979), pp. 67-80.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Giornale de 'Letterati d'Italia, Volume 19, 1714, pp. 140-185
- ↑ The first part was written from 1587 to 1589, but it was not completed before 1596
- ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium . Berlin: Ernst & Sohn 2018, pp. 216f., ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Baldi, Bernardino |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian mathematician, poet and scholar |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 5, 1553 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Urbino |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 10, 1617 |
| Place of death | Urbino |