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As a child Leone Alberti received his mathematical education from his father. He attended a school in Padua then the University of Bologna where he studied law but did not enjoy this topic. Alberti lived mainly in Rome and Florence working within the Roman Catholic Church, by 1432 he was following a literary career as a secretary in the Papal Chancery in Rome writing biographies of the saints in elegant Latin.
Alberti studied the representation of 3-dimensional objects and wrote the first general treatise Della Pictura on the laws of perspective in 1435. It was printed in 1511. He said
Nothing pleases me so much as mathematical investigations and demonstrations, especially when I can turn them to some useful practice drawing from mathematics the principles of painting perspective and some amazing propositions on the moving of weights.
Alberti also worked on maps (again involving his skill at
geometrical mappings) and he collaborated with Toscanelli who supplied Columbus
with the maps for his first voyage. He also wrote the first book on cryptography
which contains the first example of a frequency table.
Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
| List of References (6 books/articles) | A Quotation
|
| A Poster of Leone Alberti | Mathematicians born in the same country
|
| Cross-references to History Topics | |
| Other references in MacTutor | Chronology: 1300 to 1500 |
| Other Web sites | The Catholic
Encyclopedia |
| JOC/EFR December 1996 | School of
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland | 
|
| The URL of this page
is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Alberti.htm | ||