Attilio Palatini
Attilio Palatini | |
---|---|
Born |
Treviso | 18 November 1889
Died |
24 August 1949 59) Rome | (aged
Nationality | Italian |
Fields | Mathematics |
Alma mater | University of Padua |
Doctoral advisor | Tullio Levi-Civita |
Known for |
Palatini identity Calculus of variations Palatini variation |
Attilio Palatini (18 November 1889 – 24 August 1949) was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso.[1][2]
Biography
He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the University of Padua, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita.
He taught rational mechanics at the Universities of Messina, Parma and Pavia. He was mainly involved in absolute differential calculus and in general relativity. Within this latter subject he gave a sound generalization of the variational principle.
In 1919, Palatini wrote an important article where he proposed a new approach to the variational formulation of Einstein's gravitational field equations.[3] In the same paper, Palatini also showed that the variations of Christoffel symbols constitute the coordinate components of a tensor.
He wrote the "Rational Mechanics" and "Theory of relativity" entries for the Hoepli Encyclopedia of Elementary mathematics.
See also
Notes
- ↑ An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini in Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana online.
- ↑ Rocco Serini, Necrologio di Attilio Palatini, Bollettino dell’Unione Matematica Italiana, serie 3, volume 4 (1949), n. 3, pp. 334-335.
- ↑ A. Palatini (1919) Deduzione invariantiva delle equazioni gravitazionali dal principio di Hamilton, Rend. Circ. Mat. Palermo 43, 203-212 [English translation by R.Hojman and C. Mukku in P.G. Bergmann and V. De Sabbata (eds.) Cosmology and Gravitation, Plenum Press, New York (1980)]
External links
- Attilio Palatini at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini in Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana online.