Luca Valerio

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Valerio De centro gravitatis

Luca Valerio , also Valeri, (* 1553 in Naples , † January 17, 1618 in Rome ) was an Italian mathematician.

Life

Valerio's father was from Ferrara, his mother from Greece and he also grew up with relatives in Corfu , where the mother's family belonged to the nobility. He studied at the Collegio Romano in Rome, where he not only studied theology and philosophy (and received his doctorate), but was also taught mathematics by Christophorus Clavius . He then taught rhetoric and Greek at the Collegio Greco at the University of Rome (La Sapienza) in Rome. From 1600 he mainly taught mathematics and also worked as a Greek lecturer in the Vatican library and taught privately. One of his students was the future Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini, cardinal from 1585).

In his book De Centro Gravitatis from 1604, he followed up Archimedes' investigations into the determination of the volumes and centers of gravity of bodies (especially bodies of revolution) and came to new results, which found the admiration of Galileo Galilei , who became friends with Valerio and with whom he corresponded from 1609 to 1616 (he already knew him from Pisa in 1590). In this context he also dealt with the exhaustion method and made contributions to limit values ​​for fractures (similar to what was later attributed to Bonaventura Cavalieri ). He continued this in his book on the squaring of the parabola, in which he determined the center of gravity and area of ​​parabolic segments based on the well-known case of half a circular disk.

In 1612 he was admitted to the Accademia dei Lincei at the suggestion of Galileo. There he was responsible for the publication of scientific treatises (such as Galileo's letters on sunspots from 1613) and the statutes of the society (Lynceographum).

After Cardinal Bellarmine condemned the Copernican doctrine in 1616, he withdrew from the Academy and ended his correspondence with Galileo. Since he also allied himself with Galileo's opponents, Valerios was excluded from the meetings of the Academy in 1616 and he was isolated among Italian scientists. However, his application to leave was rejected and the founder of the academy, Federico Cesi, hoped for a change of heart until Valerio's death.

His mathematical work influenced Evangelista Torricelli , Jean-Charles de la Faille , Cavalieri, Paul Guldin , Grégoire de Saint-Vincent and André Tacquet . Valerio, in turn, was influenced by Franciscus Maurolicus and Federico Commandino .

He had a relationship with one of his students, Margherita Sarrocchi, who was a poet and also had a very quick temper. Her influence on Valerio, who was completely opposite in character and reticent in nature, but completely devoted to his girlfriend, was cited as a reason for his withdrawal from the academy. He also had very close ties to the Vatican and feared being involved in the impending inquisition proceedings against Galileo.

Galileo was not lastingly annoyed by Valerio's U-turn - in his Discorsi of 1638 he called Valerio the greatest geometer and Archimedes of his time.

literature

  • P. Strömholm in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  • G. Gabrieli: Luca Valerio Linceo , Atti dell'Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti, Volume 9, 1933, pp. 691-728.
  • G. Gabrieli: Luca Valerio linceo, un episodio memorabile della vecchia Accademia , Rome 1934
  • Pier Daniele Napolitani: Metodo e statica in Valerio con edizione di due sue opere giovanili , Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche, Volume 2, 1982, pp. 3-86
  • Ugo Baldini , Pier Daniele Napolitani: Per una biografia di Luca Valerio - fonti edite e inedite per una ricostruzione della sua carriera scientifica , Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche, Volume 11, 1991, No. 1
  • PD Napolitani, K. Saito: Royal road or labyrinth? Luca Valerio's De centro gravitatis solidorum and the beginnings of modern mathematics , Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche, Volume 24, 2004, pp. 67-124
  • D. Freedberg: The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002
  • A. Alessandrini: Luca Valerio Linceo , in Lino Conti (editor) La matematizzazzione dell'universo: Momenti della cultura matematica tra '500 e' 600 , Assisi, 1992, pp. 238-252 (and S. Maracchia Luca Valerio matematico Linceo in same volume pp. 253–302)
  • Henri Bosmans : Les démonstrations par l'analyse infinitésimale chez Luca Valerio , Annales de la Société scientifiques de Bruxelles, Volume 37, 1912/13, pp. 211-228
  • Heinrich Wieleitner : The survival of Archimedes' infinitesimal methods up to the beginning of the 17th century, in particular on determining the focus , sources and studies on the history of mathematics, astronomy and physics, Dept. B. Studies, Volume 1, 1931, pp. 201–220
  • CR Wallner: About the emergence of the border concept , Bibliotheca mathematica, Volume 4, 1903, pp. 246-259
  • A. Tosi: De centro gravitatis solidorum di Luca Valerio , Periodico di matematiche, Volume 35, 1957, pp. 189-201

Fonts

  • Subtilium indagationum seu quadratura circuli et aliorum curvilineorum , Rome 1582
  • De centro gravitatis solidorum libri tres , Rome 1604 (and Bologna 1661 with the Quadratura)
  • Quadratura parabolae per simplex falsum , Rome 1606 (and Bologna 1661 with De Centro Gravitatis)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Napolitani, Saito (2004), see literature. Earlier (for example in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography ) the year of birth was given as 1552.
personal data
SURNAME Valerio, Luca
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Valeri, Luca
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 1553
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1618
Place of death Rome