Roberto Marcolongo

Roberto Marcolongo (born August 28, 1862 in Rome ; † May 16, 1943 ibid) was an Italian mathematician who was best known for his contributions to the history of science (history of mechanics, Leonardo da Vinci ) as well as to vector analysis and theoretical physics .

Marcolongo came from a working-class family and studied at the Istituto Tecnico and mathematics at the University of Rome with Eugenio Beltrami , Luigi Cremona , Valentino Cerruti and Giuseppe Battaglini . After graduating in 1886, he worked for ten years as an assistant at the chair of mechanics at Cerruti. He was also an assistant for algebra and analysis from 1888 to 1895. In 1890 he completed his habilitation and was a private lecturer in mechanics. In 1895 he became associate professor and in 1900 full professor of mechanics at the University of Messina . From 1908 he taught at the University of Naples Federico II , where he stayed until his retirement in 1935.

He wrote around 200 scientific publications on mechanics, elasticity theory, analysis, mathematical physics and the history of mechanics. Among them was a presentation of the development of the mathematical theory of elasticity in Italy since Enrico Betti and the three-body problem from Newton to Karl Sundman . In his account of the history of mechanics, published in 1919, he defended the priority role of Galileo Galilei (against the portrayal of Pierre Duhem , who emphasized the role of medieval precursors).

From 1924 he succeeded Antonio Favaro in the commission for the publication of the works of Leonardo da Vinci . He was particularly concerned with Leonardo's contributions to mechanics and geometry (Codex Arundel, Codex Forster). Again, contrary to Duhem's disdain for Leonardo's mathematical abilities, he undertook to highlight them. After that, Leonardo was not a scientist in the current sense, but nevertheless attached importance to the mathematical justification of knowledge in geometry and mechanics, without which, according to Leonardo's own words, there would be no reliable knowledge.

He worked in the field of vector analysis with Cesare Burali-Forti , then known as "Italian notation". In 1906 he wrote one of the first works that contained a four-dimensional formalism for representing the relativistic invariance under Lorentz transformations . In 1921 he published together with Burali-Forti in Messina a treatise on the special and general theory of relativity , where the absolute differential calculus without coordinates was used, in contrast to the presentation by Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro .

He was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and other Italian academies.

Fonts

• Progressi e sviluppo della teoria matematica dell 'elasticità in Italia (1870–1907), Nuovo Cimento 1907
• Il problema di tre corpi dai Newton (1686) ai nostri giorni, Nuovo Cimento 1915
• La sviluppo della mecanica sino ai discepoli di Galilei, 1919
• Memorie sulla geometria e la meccanica di Leonardo da Vinci, 1937
• Leonardo da Vinci artista-scienzato, 1939, 2nd edition 1943
• Quaranta anni di isegnamento, Naples 1935 (autobiographical, with list of publications)
• Teoria matematica dello equilibrio dei corpi elastici . U. Hoepli, Milan 1904
• Meccanica razionale . U. Hoepli, Milan 1905
• Theoretical mechanics . BG Teubner, Leipzig and Berlin 1911
• Analysis vectorielle générale: Transformations linéaires (with Cesare Burali-Forti , translated into French by Paul Baridon) Mattei & C., Pavia 1913
• Analysis vectorielle générale: Applications à la mécanique et à la physique (French, with Cesare Burali-Forti and Tommaso Boggio ) Mattei & C., Pavia 1913

literature

• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 477ff

Web links

• Biography of Francesco Tricomi .