Giuseppe Veronese (7 May 1854 – 17 July 1917) 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 ...
. He was born in
Chioggia
Chioggia (; vec, Cióxa , locally ; la, Clodia) is a coastal town and ''comune'' of the Metropolitan City of Venice in the Veneto region of northern Italy.
Geography
The town is situated on a small island at the southern entrance to the L ...
, near
Venice
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...
.
Education
Veronese earned his
laurea
In Italy, the ''laurea'' is the main post-secondary academic degree. The name originally referred literally to the laurel wreath, since ancient times a sign of honor and now worn by Italian students right after their official graduation ceremony ...
in mathematics from the Istituto Tecnico di Venezia in 1872.
Work
Although Veronese's work was severely criticised as unsound by
Peano
Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The sta ...
, he is now recognised as having priority on many ideas that have since become parts of
transfinite number
In mathematics, transfinite numbers are numbers that are " infinite" in the sense that they are larger than all finite numbers, yet not necessarily absolutely infinite. These include the transfinite cardinals, which are cardinal numbers used to q ...
s and
model theory
In mathematical logic, model theory is the study of the relationship between theory (mathematical logic), formal theories (a collection of Sentence (mathematical logic), sentences in a formal language expressing statements about a Structure (math ...
, and as one of the respected authorities of the time, his work served to focus Peano and others on the need for greater rigor.
He is particularly noted for his hypothesis of relative continuity which was the foundation for his development of the first non-
Archimedean linear
Linearity is the property of a mathematical relationship ('' function'') that can be graphically represented as a straight line. Linearity is closely related to '' proportionality''. Examples in physics include rectilinear motion, the linear ...
continuum.
Veronese produced several significant monographs. The most famous appeared in 1891, ''Fondamenti di geometria a più dimensioni e a più specie di unità rettilinee esposti in forma elementare'', normally referred to as ''Fondamenti di geometria'' to distinguish it from Veronese' other works also styled ''Fondamenti''. It was this work that was most severely criticised by both Peano and
Cantor
A cantor or chanter is a person who leads people in singing or sometimes in prayer. In formal Jewish worship, a cantor is a person who sings solo verses or passages to which the choir or congregation responds.
In Judaism, a cantor sings and lead ...
, however
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 ...
described it as ''masterful'' and
Hilbert
David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many ...
as ''profound''.
See also
*
Veronese surface
References
* Philip Ehrlich (ed) ''Real Numbers, Generalisations of the Reals, and Theories of Continua'', 1994.
*
Paola Cantu', ''Giuseppe Veronese e i fondamenti della geometria''
iuseppe Veronese and the Foundations of Geometry Milano, Unicopli, "Biblioteca di cultura filosofica, 10", 1999, 270 pp. .
* Philip Ehrlich: The rise of non-Archimedean mathematics and the roots of a misconception. I. The emergence of non-Archimedean systems of magnitudes. Archive for History of Exact Sciences 60 (2006), no. 1, 1–121.
External links
*
Fondamenti di geometria full text in Italian, as HTML and as image files.
full text in Google-English translation.
*Grundzüge der Geometrie von mehreren Dimensionen und mehreren Arten gradliniger Einheiten in elementarer Form entwickelt, 1894, German translation.
of Veronese' work.
attributed to Veronese.
by P. Cantù
1854 births
1917 deaths
People from Chioggia
Algebraic geometers
Italian algebraic geometers
20th-century Italian mathematicians
19th-century Italian mathematicians
Historians of mathematics
{{Italy-mathematician-stub