Libera Trevisani Levi-Civita (17 May 1890 – 11 December 1973) 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

Verona Verona ( ; ; or ) is a city on the Adige, River Adige in Veneto, Italy, with 255,131 inhabitants. It is one of the seven provincial capitals of the region, and is the largest city Comune, municipality in the region and in Northeast Italy, nor ...

Biography

Libera Trevisani earned her classical lyceum A levels in 1908 at the "Bernardino Telesio" Lyceum in

Cosenza Cosenza (; Languages of Calabria#Northern Calabrian (Cosentian), Cosentian: ''Cusenza'', ) is a city located in Calabria, Italy. The city centre has a population of approximately 70,000, while the urban area counts more than 200,000 inhabitants. ...

. In the 1908–1909 academic year, she matriculated at the

University of Padova The University of Padua (, UNIPD) is an Italian public research university in Padua, Italy. It was founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers from the University of Bologna, who previously settled in Vicenza; thus, it is the second-oldest ...

. In 1912, she graduated at the University of Padova, under the guidance of the mathematician

Tullio Levi-Civita Tullio Levi-Civita, (; ; 29 March 1873 – 29 December 1941) was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus ( tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made signifi ...

, with a thesis titled ''Sul moto medio dei nodi nel problema dei tre corpi'' ("About the average motion within the three body problem"). This thesis extended Levi-Civita's researches on the average asymptotic motion existence, for a point represented by the generic solution of a linear system with periodic coefficients, to the problem of the three bodies, whenever this is referred to the moon theory. The results achieved by Trevisani were so satisfactory that her mentor decided to present them to 28 April 1912 meeting at the

Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti The Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (IVSLA) is an academy of sciences in Venice. History The Istituto Veneto was created as the Reale Istituto Nazionale, created by Napoleon for the Kingdom of Italy in 1810. The current name was g ...

(Veneto's Institute of sciences, letters and arts). The note was published in the ''Atti'' (Records) in the same year. In April 1914, the young Libera Trevisani married her mentor, Tullio Levi-Civita. In 1944 she was elected president of the reinstated (''Federazione Italiana Laureate e Diplomate di Istituti Superiori'' – Federation of Italian Graduated Women in Higher Education) which had been dissolved in 1935 by the

fascist regime Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...

. She remained in office until 1953 and carried on institutional initiatives aimed at the empowerment of women and the protection of women's rights. In 1945 Libera retrieved Susanna SilbersteinIn Memoria di Susanna Silberstein
''Ha Keillah, LUGLIO 2022 ANNO XLVII - 234 TAMMUZ 5782'' from the Florentine convent where her parents had placed her just before they were rounded up by the Nazis in 1943, and she later adopted her.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trevisani Levi-Civita, Libera 1890 births 1973 deaths 20th-century Italian mathematicians University of Padua 20th-century women mathematicians Italian women mathematicians 20th-century Italian women