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Full Description
In the first decade of the twentieth century as Albert Einstein began formulating a revolutionary theory of gravity, the Italian mathematician Gregorio Ricci was entering the later stages of what appeared to be a productive if not particularly memorable career, devoted largely to what his colleagues regarded as the dogged development of a mathematical language he called the absolute differential calculus. In 1912, the work of these two dedicated scientists would intersect-and physics and mathematics would never be the same. Einstein's Italian Mathematicians chronicles the lives and intellectual contributions of Ricci and his brilliant student Tullio Levi-Civita, including letters, interviews, memoranda, and other personal and professional papers, to tell the remarkable, little-known story of how two Italian academicians, of widely divergent backgrounds and temperaments, came to provide the indispensable mathematical foundation-today known as the tensor calculus-for general relativity.
Contents
The Ricci of Lugo
The making of a mathematician
Munich
Padua
Math and marriage
A promotion that wasn't
The absolute differential calculus
The alter ego
Intermezzo
The indispensable mathematical tool
"Write to me next time in Italian"
Parallel displacements
From Ricci's absolute differential calculus to Einstein's theorem for general relativity
T. Levi-Civita, "Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro"
Obituary of Tullio Levi-Civita
Selected references
Notes
Index
