Julio Cesar Firrufino or Ferrufino (16th century) was an engineer and mathematician who had a chair in mathematics in Madrid from 1604 to 1650.

Life and work

He was the son of Julian Firrufino (ca 1535–1604), born in

Alessandria Alessandria (; pms, Lissandria ) is a city and ''comune'' in Piedmont, Italy, and the capital of the Province of Alessandria. The city is sited on the alluvial plain between the Tanaro and the Bormida rivers, about east of Turin. Alessandria ...

(

Duchy of Milan The Duchy of Milan ( it, Ducato di Milano; lmo, Ducaa de Milan) was a state in northern Italy, created in 1395 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, then the lord of Milan, and a member of the important Visconti family, which had been ruling the city sin ...

) who had also a chair in Geometry and Artillery granted by the king of Spain. However, we know few biographical data of Julio Cesar, his son. Only from a document dated 1644, we know he was 66 years old, so we can suppose he was born in 1578, when his father had a chair of Naval Artillery in the '' Casa de Contratación'' and, probably, he was born in Sevilla. In 1600 he was assistant of the Spanish minister of Artillery and from 1604, after the death of his father, he was appointed to a chair on Mathematics and Fortification, after the approval of

Andrés García de Céspedes Andres or Andrés may refer to: *Andres, Illinois, an unincorporated community in Will County, Illinois, US *Andres, Pas-de-Calais, a commune in Pas-de-Calais, France *Andres (name) *Hurricane Andres * "Andres" (song), a 1994 song by L7 See also ...

and João Baptista Lavanha who examined him. He was in charge of the chair until 1650, one year before his death; in this date he was replaced by his student

Luis Carduchi Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archai ...

, member of a family of old friends of Firrufino. In 1626 he published ''Plática Manual y Breve Compendio de Artillería'', which was an abstract of a treatise of artillery that he was not allowed to publish by political reasons. In 1638 he was accused by fraud in the production of 66 artillery guns in Sevilla; for this reason he was imprisoned during some time in 1644. In 1648 was published his most important work: ''El perfecto artillero'', which is an encyclopedic treatise, but not much original, based in

Tartaglia Tartaglia may refer to: *Tartaglia (commedia dell'arte), Commedia dell'arte stock character *Angelo Tartaglia (1350 or 1370–1421), Italian condottiero * Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (1499/1500–1557), Venetian mathematician and engineer *Ivo Tarta ...

ideas., page 596.

References

Bibliography

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External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Firrufino, Julio Cesar 1570s births 1651 deaths 17th-century Spanish people 17th-century Spanish mathematicians Italian emigrants to Spain