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Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010201091 | QA29.V64 G66 2007 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
The life of Vito Volterra, one of the finest scientists and mathematicians Italy ever produced, spans the period from the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1860 to the onset of the Second World War--an era of unparalleled progress and unprecedented turmoil in the history of Europe. Born into an Italian Jewish family in the year of the liberation of Italy's Jewish ghettos, Volterra was barely in his twenties when he made his name as a mathematician and took his place as a leading light in Italy's modern scientific renaissance. By his early forties, he was a world-renowned mathematician, a sought-after figure in European intellectual and social circles, the undisputed head of Italy's mathematics and physics school--and still living with his mother, who decided the time was ripe to arrange his marriage. When Italy entered World War I in 1915, the fifty-five-year-old Volterra served with distinction and verve as a lieutenant and did not put on civilian clothes again until the Armistice of 1918. This book, based in part on unpublished personal letters and interviews, traces the extraordinary life and times of one of Europe's foremost scientists and mathematicians, from his teenage struggles to avoid the stifling life of a ""respectable"" bank clerk in Florence, to his seminal mathematical work--which today influences fields as diverse as economics, physics, and ecology--and from his spirited support of Italy's scientific and democratic institutions during his years as an Italian Senator, to his steadfast defiance of the Fascists and Mussolini. In recounting the life of this outstanding scientist, European Jewish intellectual, committed Italian patriot, and devoted if frequently distracted family man, The Volterra Chronicles depicts a remarkable individual in a prodigious age and takes the reader on a vivid and splendidly detailed historical journey.
Reviews 1
Choice Review
Vito Volterra (1860-1940) is perhaps best known for his collaboration with son-in-law Umberto D'Ancona, for his work on nonlinear systems of differential equations applied to population biology. Volterra, in fact, was one of Italy's leading mathematicians and mathematical physicists, having done fundamental work in functional analysis and differential and integral equations, and serving as a key public face for Italian science and mathematics for decades. This carefully documented biography by California Institute of Technology archivist Goodstein provides a vivid, very readable depiction of the whole of Volterra's life, beginning with the early evidence of his precocity, through his struggles (against immediate family wishes) to obtain an academic career and his subsequent great scientific and political successes, to his 1931 refusal to sign an oath of loyalty to Mussolini's Fascist regime, which resulted in the loss of all formal academic affiliations. Goodstein does not provide much by way of specific detail of Volterra's scientific contributions; that is accomplished in a reprint of an extensive technical obituary by Sir Edmund Whittaker. Also appended are translations of two of Volterra's addresses. Overall, a fascinating, intimate portrait. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. J. Colley Oberlin College
Table of Contents
| "The Jewish mathematician" |
| "A new era is dawning," 1860 |
| "This, above all, I promise," 1863-1870 |
| "That damned passion," 1874-1877 |
| "Long live the republic," 1878-1882 |
| "Professor by deed," 1880-1883 |
| "Our professor of small intervals," 1883-1893 |
| "The life I live," 1887-1895 |
| "Demonstrations of their resentment," 1893-1900 |
| "God liberate us from his symbols" |
| "It is the greatest desire of my life," 1900 |
| "Most important for our fatherland" |
| "Will they create a new world?" |
| "A political man" |
| "A professor in America" |
| "Empires die" Epilogue Sir Edmund Whittaker, |
| "Vito Volterra, 1860-1940" |
| On the attempts to apply mathematics to the biological and social sciences |
| Science at the present moment and the new |
| Italian society for the progress of science |
| Acknowledgments |
| Selected bibliography |
| Notes Index |
