Tullio Levi-Civita

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Born: 29 March 1873 in Padua, Veneto, Italy
Died: 29 Dec 1941 in Rome, Italy

 

Tullio Levi-Civita took his degree at the University of Padua where one of his teachers was Ricci with whom Levi-Civita was to collaborate.

Levi-Civita was appointed to the Chair of Mechanics at Padua in 1898, a post which he was to hold for 20 years. In 1918 he was appointed to the Chair of Mechanics at Rome where he spent another 20 years until removed from office by the discrimination policies of the government (he was of Jewish descent).

Levi-Civita had very great command of pure mathematics, his geometric intuition was particularly strong, which he applied to a variety of problems of applied mathematics. One of his papers in 1895 improved on Riemann's contour integral formula for the number of primes in a given interval.

Levi-Civita is best known for his work on the absolute differential calculus with its applications to the theory of relativity. In 1887 he published a famous paper in which he developed the calculus of tensors, following on the work of Christoffel, including covariant differentiation. In 1900 he published, jointly with Ricci, the theory of tensors Méthodes de calcul differential absolu et leures applications in a form which was used by Einstein 15 years later.

Weyl was to take up Levi-Civita's ideas and make them into a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. Levi-Civita's work was of extreme importance in the theory of relativity, and he produced a series of papers treating elegantly the problem of a static gravitational field.

Analytic dynamics was another topic studied by Levi-Civita, many of his papers examining special cases of the Three Body Problem. He also wrote on hydrodynamics and the theory of systems of partial differential equations. He added to the theory of Cauchy and Kovalevskaya and wrote up this work in an excellant book written in 1931.

In 1933 he contributed to Dirac's equations of quantum theory.

The Royal Society conferred the Sylvester medal on Levi-Civita in 1922, while in 1930 he was elected a foreign member. He was also an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. He attended a meeting of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in St Andrews.

Levi-Civita, like Volterra and many other Italian scientists, were strongly and actively opposed to Fascism. After he was dismissed from his post the blow soon told on his health and he developed severe heart problems. He died of a stroke.