Gustavo Colonnetti

Gustavo Colonnetti (born November 8, 1886 in Turin , † March 20, 1968 there ) was an Italian civil engineer and mechanical engineer.

Colonnetti studied civil engineering at the Turin Polytechnic with Camillo Guidi with a degree in 1908 and mathematics with Corrado Segre with a degree in 1911. In 1910 he received the Venia legendi ( libera docenza ) in engineering and taught at the shipbuilding school (Scuola Superiore Navale) in Genoa . In 1914 he became a professor for applied mechanics at the engineering school in Pisa , whose director he became in 1918. In 1920 he returned to the Turin Polytechnic as a professor of rational and higher mechanics, of which he was director from 1922 to 1925. In 1928 he succeeded his teacher Guidi at the chair of civil engineering and director of the materials testing laboratory. He was a staunch Catholic and fled from the Fascists in 1941 to Switzerland, where he in Lausanne at the city's University received a teaching position and opened a university in exile with other emigrated Italian professors. During this time he published politically under the pseudonym Etegonon in the Gazzetta ticinese . After the war he was active in the Christian Democratic Party ( Democrazia Cristiana ). He returned to Turin in 1944 and taught at the Polytechnic until his retirement in 1962.

In 1946 Colonetti founded the metrological institute at the Italian National Research Council, which he headed until 1956.

He is known for theoretical work on elasticity theory (Colonnetti's theorem).

From 1918 he was a corresponding member of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino , socio nazionale since 1942. In 1926 he became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and in 1950 a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences . Colonnetti received honorary doctorates from Turin, Lausanne, Liège, Poitiers and Toulouse.

In 1935 he edited selected writings by Carlo Alberto Castigliano .

Franco Levi was one of his students in Turin .

Fonts

• L'equilibre des corps déformables, Paris: Dunod 1955
• Scienza delle costruzioni, Turin 1941

literature

• Enzo Pozzato:  Colonnetti, Gustavo. In: Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 27:  Collenuccio – Confortini. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1982.
• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 962 (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Polytechnic was not established until 1946.
2. ^ Entry at the academy
3. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter C. Académie des sciences, accessed on October 31, 2019 (French).