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, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
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 Ven ...
.
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
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 signific ...
.
He taught
rational mechanics 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
In mathematics, Ricci calculus constitutes the rules of index notation and manipulation for tensors and tensor fields on a differentiable manifold, with or without a metric tensor or connection. It is also the modern name for what used to be ...
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 science and especially in mathematical studies, a variational principle is one that enables a problem to be solved using calculus of variations, which concerns finding functions that optimize the values of quantities that depend on those funct ...
.
In 1919, Palatini wrote an important article where he proposed a new approach to the variational formulation of
Einstein'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 distanc ...
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 tensor ...
.
He wrote the "Rational Mechanics" and "Theory of relativity" entries for the ''Hoepli Encyclopedia of Elementary mathematics''.
See also
*
Self-dual Palatini action
Ashtekar variables, which were a new canonical formalism of general relativity, raised new hopes for the canonical quantization of general relativity and eventually led to loop quantum gravity. Smolin and others independently discovered that the ...
*
Tetradic Palatini action
*
Palatini identity
*
Palatini variation
Notes
External links
*
*
An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatiniin ''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