Attilio Palatini

Attilio Palatini
Born (1889-11-18)18 November 1889
Treviso
Died 24 August 1949(1949-08-24) (aged 59)
Rome
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

  1. ↑ An Italian short biography of Attilio Palatini in Edizione Nazionale Mathematica Italiana online.
  2. ↑ Rocco Serini, Necrologio di Attilio Palatini, Bollettino dell’Unione Matematica Italiana, serie 3, volume 4 (1949), n. 3, pp. 334-335.
  3. ↑ 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

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