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, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
born in
Verona
Verona ( , ; vec, Verona or ) is a city on the Adige River in Veneto, Northern Italy, Italy, with 258,031 inhabitants. It is one of the seven provincial capitals of the region. It is the largest city Comune, municipality in the region and the ...
.
Biography
Libera Trevisani earned her classical lyceum A levels in 1908 at the "Bernardino Telesio" Lyceum in
Cosenza. In the 1908–1909 academic year, she matriculated at the
University of Padova
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 B ...
.
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 significa ...
, 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 gi ...
(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, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...
. 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 Silberstein
In 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