Elena Freda facts for kids

Elena Freda (born March 25, 1890, died November 25, 1978) was a brilliant Italian scientist. She was a mathematician and a mathematical physicist. She worked closely with Vito Volterra, a famous mathematician, on topics like mathematical analysis (a branch of math), and how math could be used in electromagnetism (the study of electricity and magnetism) and biomathematics (using math to understand living things).

Elena Freda's Early Life and Studies

Elena Freda was born on March 25, 1890. She loved to learn and studied at the Sapienza University of Rome. First, she focused on projective geometry, a type of math that deals with shapes and spaces. Her teacher was Guido Castelnuovo. She earned her first degree in 1912.

After that, Elena became very interested in mathematical physics. This field uses math to explain how the physical world works. She studied with Orso Mario Corbino and earned a second degree in physics from the same university in 1915. Around this time, she also started working with Vito Volterra, a very important mathematician. They began their collaboration in 1915.

Working During World War I

In 1915, Italy joined World War I. Vito Volterra strongly supported the war effort and joined in. He asked some of his students, including Elena Freda, to help him. They worked on important calculations for ballistics. Ballistics is the science of how things like bullets and rockets move through the air. Elena wrote a letter in 1915 about how hard it was to spend many days doing calculations on special "millimetered paper."

Teaching and Later Career

After the war, Elena Freda continued her studies. In 1918, she earned a special qualification called a habilitation in physics. This allowed her to teach at a university. In 1919, she became a teacher (a docent) of mathematical physics at Sapienza University.

For a short time, in 1923 and 1924, she taught mathematical physics and rational mechanics at the University of Messina. Rational mechanics is the study of how objects move and the forces that make them move. After that, she returned to Rome. She taught there for the rest of her career until she retired in 1959. Elena Freda passed away in Rome on November 25, 1978.

Elena Freda's Important Research

Elena Freda's early research was about projective geometry. But by 1915, she started focusing on mathematical analysis and mathematical physics. She published work on Euler's homogeneous function theorem, which is a math rule. She also used mathematical analysis to study experiments in electromagnetics, which is the science of electricity and magnetism. She kept publishing papers on electromagnetics into the 1920s.

Collaborations and Key Discoveries

Vito Volterra greatly inspired Elena's early work in analysis. He even presented some of her findings to a famous science group called the Accademia dei Lincei in 1916. In 1921, she even wrote a paper together with Volterra. She also worked with another female Italian physicist named Nella Mortara [it].

Later, Elena Freda became interested in mathematical biology. This field uses math to understand living things, like how animal populations grow and change. This interest came from Volterra's work on population dynamics. In 1931, she wrote a review of Volterra's work in this area.

Through the 1930s, she returned to more pure math studies in analysis. Her most important work during this time was a book published in 1937. It was called Méthode des caractéristiques pour intégration des équations aux dérivées partielles linéaires hyperboliques. This book, written in French, showed how to solve complex math problems called second-order hyperbolic partial differential equations. Volterra wrote the introduction to her book, showing how much he respected her work.