Luigi Poletti (31 December 1864 – 10 March 1967) was an Italian mathematician and poet. He was born in Pontremoli, where he also died, age 102. He attended the episcopal seminary in Potremoli, then the high school of Parma, graduated in Turin and started to study

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

there. He did not finish and took a job in a bank. 1911 he accidentally found the book of prime number tables written by

Lehmer Lehmer is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Derrick Norman Lehmer (1867–1938), number theorist who produced tables of prime factors and mechanical devices like Lehmer sieves * Derrick Henry Lehmer (1905–1991), number theoris ...

, a mathematician from the United States in the house of professor Gino Loria, a friend of his family, when he visited Genoa. Since then he spent many years to extend the first table in order to simplify "Eratosthenes Crivello" (

sieve of Eratosthenes In mathematics, the sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. It does so by iteratively marking as composite (i.e., not prime) the multiples of each prime, starting with the first prime n ...

), a method from ancient Greece to find

prime numbers A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

. He gave his method a new name: "Neocribrum" (Novum Eratosthenes Cribrum) and he got recognition from the scientific community. Apart from that, he was, together with André Gerardin, member of a study commission of the Association française pour l'avancement des sciences (1946). With the assistance of

N. G. W. H. Beeger Nicolaas George Wijnand Henri Beeger (1884, in Utrecht – 1965, in Amsterdam) was a Dutch mathematician. His 1916 doctorate was on Dirichlet series. He worked for most of his life as a teacher, working on mathematics papers in his spare evenin ...

he had the possibility to extend the table of

beyond the number 10 006 721. 1955 he was awarded a gold medal and the order of the Republic of Italy by Italian president Giovanni Gronchi. In his long life (102 years) he was a member of the city council in the rank of Commissario Prefettizio. He was a poet in his native dialect Pontremolese (poems and texts for popular music). He wrote for example Al Campanon d‘ Pontrémal, La Zumniana (for which he also composed the music) or Al cant dal Cont Ugolìn. He translated XXXIII of "

Dantes Inferno ''Inferno'' (; Italian language, Italian for "Hell") is the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri's 14th-century Epic poetry, epic poem ''Divine Comedy''. It is followed by ''Purgatorio'' and ''Paradiso (Dante), Paradiso''. The ''Infern ...

". As an amateur he wrote poems in Latin language.

Notes

Article on "Lungiana Net":"Famous people from Pontremoli"
1864 births 1967 deaths People from the Province of Massa-Carrara 19th-century Italian mathematicians 20th-century Italian mathematicians Italian centenarians Men centenarians {{Italy-mathematician-stub