Pietro Cossali
Pietro Cossali (born June 29, 1748 in Verona , † December 20, 1815 in Padua ) was an Italian mathematician.
Cossali came from a noble family and studied at the Jesuit college and then with a private teacher (a Theatine ). In 1768 he went to Milan , where he became a member of the Theatiner Order. He received an offer to teach canon law at the University of Padua, but became more interested in mathematics, physics and philosophy and preferred to return to Verona, where in 1778 he founded a private scientific academy specifically to promote experimental physics. Cossali was controversial and in particular had disputes with the director of the military school in Verona Antonio Maria Lorgna , who initially refused him admission to the Società Italiana di Scienze, which he founded in 1782 (he was nevertheless accepted in 1793). In 1787 he became professor for theoretical physics in Parma , later for astronomy. From 1791 he published several volumes of Ephemeris . In 1806 he was appointed professor of higher analysis in Padua by Napoleon.
From the 1790s he dealt intensively with the history of algebra, after he had published in 1779 about the solution of the cubic equation by Girolamo Cardano . In 1797 and 1799 his history of algebra appeared, which made him famous. He also corrected some mistakes in the mathematics history of Jean-Étienne Montucla . The focus was on the further development of algebra in Italy (from Leonardo of Pisa , whose Liber Abaci he correctly dated 1202) from Arabic and Greek sources.
Manuscripts on the history of mathematics came from his estate to the library of Verona and were partly edited by Baldassare Boncompagni in 1857 . In 1996 Romano Gatto published La storia del caso irreducibile by Cossali.
He was one of the first members of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice.
Fonts
- Origine, trasporto in Italia, primi progressi in essa dell'algebra. Storia critica di nuove disquisitioni analitiche e metafisiche arricchita, 2 volumes 1797, 1799
literature
- Ugo Baldini : Cossali, Pietro. In: Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 30: Cosattini – Crispolto. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1984.
- Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, pp. 399-400
Web links
- Cossali, Pietro. In: Enciclopedie on line. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome. Retrieved April 11, 2017.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cossali, Pietro |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 29, 1748 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Verona |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 20, 1815 |
| Place of death | Padua |