Roberto Marcolongo facts for kids

Roberto Marcolongo was an Italian mathematician born in Rome on August 28, 1862. He passed away in Rome on May 16, 1943. He is famous for his important work in vector calculus and theoretical physics. These are advanced areas of mathematics and science.

Early Life and Career

Roberto Marcolongo finished his university studies in 1886. After graduating, he worked as an assistant to Valentino Cerruti in Rome. In 1895, he became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Messina. This field studies how objects move and the forces that make them move. In 1908, he moved to the University of Naples. He taught there until he retired in 1935.

Important Discoveries

Marcolongo worked closely with another mathematician, Cesare Burali-Forti. They developed a way of doing vector calculus that was sometimes called "Italian notation." Vector calculus is a type of math that deals with quantities that have both size and direction, like force or velocity.

In 1906, Marcolongo wrote an early paper that used a "four-dimensional formalism." This was a way to describe how things look the same even when they are moving very fast. This idea is related to Lorentz transformations, which are rules that explain how measurements of space and time change for objects moving at high speeds.

In 1921, he published a book in Messina about special relativity and general relativity. These are theories by Albert Einstein about how space, time, gravity, and motion are connected. In his book, Marcolongo used a special type of math called "absolute differential calculus without coordinates." He developed this with Burali-Forti. It was different from the method used by other famous mathematicians like Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro.

Marcolongo was a respected member of the Accademia dei Lincei. This is one of Italy's oldest and most important scientific academies. He was also part of other Italian academic groups.

Works

• Teoria matematica dello equilibrio dei corpi elastici (Milano: U. Hoepli, 1904)
• Meccanica razionale (Milano: U. Hoepli, 1905)
• Omografie vettoriali con Applicazioni (with Burali-Forti) (Torino, G. B. Petrini, 1909)
• Analyse vectorielle générale: Transformations linéaires (with Cesare Burali-Forti, translated into French by Paul Baridon) (Pavia: Mattei & C., 1913)
• Analyse vectorielle générale: Applications à la mécanique et à la physique (in French, with Cesare Burali-Forti and Tommaso Boggio) (Pavia:Mattei & C., 1913)
• Il Problema dei Tre Corpi da Newton ai Nostri Giorni (Milano, Ulrico Hoepli, 1919)
• Relatività (Messina, G. Principato, 1921)

Literature

• Biography by Francesco Tricomi.

See also

In Spanish: Roberto Marcolongo para niños