Attilio Palatini (18 November 1889 – 24 August 1949) was an Italian

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

born in

Treviso Treviso ( , ; vec, Trevixo) is a city and ''comune'' in the Veneto region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Treviso and the municipality has 84,669 inhabitants (as of September 2017). Some 3,000 live within the Veneti ...

Biography

Palatini was the seventh of the eight children of Michele (1855-1914) and Ilde Furlanetto (1856-1895). In 1900, during the celebrations for the election of his father to Parliament, he was blinded by a young man from Treviso, losing the use of one eye. He completed his secondary studies in Treviso. He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the

University of Padua The University of Padua ( it, Università degli Studi di Padova, UNIPD) is an Italian university located in the city of Padua, region of Veneto, northern Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers from ...

, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita. He taught

rational mechanics Rational mechanics may refer to: *'' mécanique rationelle'', a historical (19th century) term for classical mechanics *a school of thought within physics advocated by Clifford Truesdell in the 1960s See also * Newtonianism *Auguste Comte *''Archi ...

at the Universities of Messina,

Parma Parma (; egl, Pärma, ) is a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna known for its architecture, music, art, prosciutto (ham), cheese and surrounding countryside. With a population of 198,292 inhabitants, Parma is the second mos ...

and

Pavia Pavia (, , , ; la, Ticinum; Medieval Latin: ) is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy in northern Italy, south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It has a population of c. 73,086. The city was the cap ...

. He was mainly involved in absolute differential calculus and in

general relativity General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. ...

. Within this latter subject he gave a sound generalization of the variational principle. In 1919, Palatini wrote an important article where he proposed a new approach to the variational formulation of

Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

's gravitational field equations. In the same paper, Palatini also showed that the variations of

Christoffel symbols In mathematics and physics, the Christoffel symbols are an array of numbers describing a metric connection. The metric connection is a specialization of the affine connection to surfaces or other manifolds endowed with a metric, allowing dis ...

constitute the coordinate components of a

tensor In mathematics, a tensor is an algebraic object that describes a multilinear relationship between sets of algebraic objects related to a vector space. Tensors may map between different objects such as vectors, scalars, and even other tens ...

. He wrote the "Rational Mechanics" and "Theory of relativity" entries for the ''Hoepli Encyclopedia of Elementary mathematics''.

Notes

External links

* *
An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini
in ''Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana'' online. {{DEFAULTSORT:Palatini, Attilio 1889 births 1949 deaths Differential geometers Italian relativity theorists 19th-century Italian mathematicians 20th-century Italian mathematicians University of Padua alumni University of Pavia faculty University of Messina faculty University of Parma faculty