Attilio Palatini

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

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[]

  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

External links[]

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