Attilio Palatini

Attilio Palatini (18 November 1889 – 24 August 1949) was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso.[1][2]

Attilio Palatini
Born(1889-11-18)18 November 1889
Treviso, Italy
Died24 August 1949(1949-08-24) (aged 59)
Rome, Italy
Alma materUniversity of Padua
Known forPalatini identity
Calculus of variations
Palatini variation
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Doctoral advisorTullio Levi-Civita

Biography

Palatini was the seventh of the eight children of Michele (1855-1914) and Ilde Furlanetto (1856-1895). In 1900, during the celebrations for the election of his father to Parliament, he was blinded by a young man from Treviso, losing the use of one eye. He completed his secondary studies in Treviso. 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
  1. An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini in Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana online.
  2. Serini, Rocco (1949). "Necrologio di Attilio Palatini". Bollettino dell'Unione Matematica Italiana. 3 (in Italian). 4 (3): 334–335.
  3. Palatini, Attilio (1919), "Deduzione invariantiva delle equazioni gravitazionali dal principio di Hamilton" [Invariant deduction of the gravitanional equations from the principle of Hamilton], Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo, 1 (in Italian), 43: 203–212, doi:10.1007/BF03014670, S2CID 121043319
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