Ettore Bortolotti

Ettore Bortolotti

Ettore Bortolotti (born March 6, 1866 in Bologna , † February 17, 1947 there ) was an Italian mathematician .

Live and act

Bortolotti initially studied with the aim of becoming an engineer (and worked on the side for a telegraph company), but then studied mathematics (graduation summa cum laude 1889) in Bologna under the influence of Salvatore Pincherle . After that he was Pincherle's assistant until 1891 and then became a mathematics teacher in Modica , Sicily. In 1892/3 he studied in Paris , where he heard from Henri Poincaré , Émile Picard , Gaston Darboux and Camille Jordan , and was then a high school teacher (Liceo) in Rome . In 1896 he completed his habilitation and in 1900 became professor of analysis in Modena . In 1920 he became a geometry professor at the University of Bologna , where he remained until his retirement in 1936. From 1923 to 1945 (from when it was founded by Pincherle) he was secretary of the Italian Mathematical Union. When Pincherle organized the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna in 1928, he was also secretary.

Bortolotti, under the influence of Valentino Cerruti (editor of the works of Galilei and Fagnano) in Rome, turned to the history of mathematics and initially dealt with Paolo Ruffini (1902) as the forerunner of Évariste Galois and Augustin Louis Cauchy in group theory and equation theory. From 1914 to 1954 he published his collected works in three volumes. But he is particularly known for the research of Italian Renaissance mathematics, especially for the contributions in algebra by Scipione del Ferro (whose priority in solving the cubic equation he represented against Gino Loria and others), Nicolo Tartaglia , Gerolamo Cardano , Rafael Bombelli , whose books IV and V of his algebra he discovered and published in 1929. He also dealt with the history of mathematics in Bologna (about which his book appeared in 1947), such as the contributions of Pietro Antonio Cataldi to chain fractions and early works of Bonaventura Cavalieri , Evangelista Torricelli (on the works of Torricelli edited by Gino Loria, the Bortolotti heavily criticized, a protracted argument arose between the two) and others on analysis. His investigations into the history of mathematics in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries appeared in 1928 and further investigations into the history of Italian mathematics (and beyond) in an anthology in 1944. Compared to Moritz Cantor , he represented the pioneering role of Leonardo Fibonacci in the establishment of algebra in medieval Europe (Cantor favored Jordanus Nemorarius ).

In 1923 he published lectures on analytical geometry.

literature

• Dauben, Scriba (editor) Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002