Pia Maria Nalli

Pia Maria Nalli (born February 10, 1886 in Palermo , † September 27, 1964 in Catania ) was an Italian mathematician.

Life

Nalli studied mathematics at the University of Palermo with the Laurea degree in 1910 with Giuseppe Bagnera . In the same year she became a member of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo and published in its Rendicondi from 1910. Her research area was initially algebraic geometry and then analysis. She was Bagnera's assistant at the university and from 1912 a teacher, including at a technical school for girls in Palermo. In 1914 she completed her habilitation in Palermo. In 1915 it showed that the Denjoy integral ( introduced by Arnaud Denjoy in 1912 ) can be used to compute the Fourier coefficients of a Denjoy integrable function ( Paul Du Bois-Reymond had already done this in the case of Riemann integrability and Charles-Jean de La Vallée Poussin shown for Lebesgue integrability). Then she dealt with Dirichlet series and linear integral equations (in the successor of Ivar Fredholm ). In 1921 she became an associate professor of analysis at the University of Cagliari . As is customary in Italy, the selection for the professorship took place on the basis of a competition in which she was second behind Mauro Picone , who preferred to stay in Catania.

She continued to apply for professorship positions, where she got the impression that she was disadvantaged as a woman, especially after she won the competition in Pavia, but was still not given a professorship there. Nalli complained about this in a letter to Tullio Levi-Civita, among other things . Finally, in 1927, she became a professor at the University of Catania , but only after the intervention of the Italian Minister of Education, to whom Nalli had complained. It was then that she began doing research on differential geometry and tensor analysis, Levi-Civita's specialty. She felt uncomfortable in Catania because of the forced employment and actually wanted to go to Palermo, but there was resistance at the university to her appointment, the reason being that women could not maintain discipline and, to her bitterness, there were less qualified candidates there preferred.

A street in Rome is named after her.

Fonts

• Lezione de calcolo differenziale assoluto, Catania, Tipogra-fìa Zuccarello ed Izzi, 1952
• Opere scelte, Rozzano: Litografia D. Cislaghi, 1977 (on behalf of the Unione Matematica Italiana and the University of Catania)

literature

• Gaetano Fichera Pia Nalli , Bollettino dell'unione matematica italiana, Volume 20, 1965, 544-549

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Pia Maria Nalli. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Italian biography