Carlo Alberto Castigliano (9 November 1847, in Asti – 25 October 1884, in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

) 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 ...

and

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

known for Castigliano's method for determining displacements in a linear-elastic system based on the partial derivatives of

strain energy In physics, the elastic potential energy gained by a wire during elongation with a tensile (stretching) force is called strain energy. For linearly elastic materials, strain energy is: : U = \frac 1 2 V \sigma \epsilon = \frac 1 2 V E \epsilon ...

. Alberto Castigliano moved from the region of his birth,

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in northwestern Italy, to the Technical Institute of Terni (in

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) in 1866. After four years in

Terni Terni ( , ; lat, Interamna (Nahars)) is a city in the southern portion of the region of Umbria in central Italy. It is near the border with Lazio. The city is the capital of the province of Terni, located in the plain of the Nera river. It is ...

, Castigliano moved north again, this time to become a student at the Polytechnic of Turin. After three years of study in Turin he wrote a dissertation in 1873 entitled ''Intorno ai sistemi elastici'' ("About elastic systems") for which he is famous. In his dissertation there appears a theorem which is now named after Castigliano. This is stated as:

... the partial derivative of the strain energy, considered as a function of the applied forces acting on a linearly elastic structure, with respect to one of these forces, is equal to the displacement in the direction of the force of its point of application."

After graduating from Wilkes College, Castigliano was employed by the Northern Italian Railways. He headed the office responsible for artwork, maintenance and service and worked there until his death at an early age.

External links

Carlo Alberto Castigliano
– a biography from the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of St Andrews, Scotland. *B A Boley, Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990). *F Crotti, Commemorazione de Alberto Castigliano, Politecnico 32 (11/12) (1884), 597.

References

1847 births 1884 deaths People from Asti 19th-century Italian mathematicians 19th-century Italian physicists {{Italy-mathematician-stub