Tullio Levi-Civita (March 29, 1873 - December 29, 1941) was a Jewish Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor (some say Levi-Civita himself was co-inventor) of the tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics (notably on the three-body problem) and hydrodynamics.

Biography

Born in Padua, Levi-Civita was the son of Giacomo Levi-Civita, a lawyer and one-time Italian senator. He graduated in 1892 from the University of Padua Faculty of Mathematics. In 1894 he earned a teaching diploma after which he was appointed to the Parvia Faculty of Science teacher's college. In 1898 he was appointed to the Padua Chair of Rational Mechanics where he met and, in 1914, married Libera Trevisani, one of his pupils. He remained in his position at Padua until 1918, when he was appointed to the Chair of Higher Analysis at the University of Rome; in another two years he was appointed to the Chair of Mechanics there.

In 1900 he and Ricci-Curbastro published the theory of tensors in Méthodes de calcul differential absolu et leures applications which Albert Einstein used as a resource to master the tensor calculus, a critical tool in Einstein's development of the theory of general relativity. Levi-Civita's series of papers on the problem of a static gravitational field were also discussed in his 1915-1917 correspondence with Einstein. The focus of the correspondence related to "the variational formulation of the gravitational field equations and their covariance properties, and the definition of the gravitational energy and the existence of gravitational waves." In 1933 Levi-Civita contributed to Paul Dirac's equations in quantum mechanics as well.

His textbook on tensor calculus The Absolute Differential Calculus (originally a set of lecture notes in Italian co-authored with Ricci-Curbastro) remains one of the standard texts more than a century after its first publication, with several translations available.

He died in Rome in 1941.

References

2. C Cattani and M De Maria, Geniality and rigor: the Einstein - Levi-Civita correspondence (1915-1917), Riv. Stor. Sci. (2) 4 (1) (1996), 1–22; as cited in MacTutor archive.
3. Amir D. Aczel, God's Equation, MJF Books, New York, 1999.

See also

• Levi-Civita connection
• Levi-Civita symbol

External links

• Scienceworld biography
• Another short biography

1873 births | 1941 deaths | Natives of Padua | Differential geometers | Contributors to general relativity | Italian mathematicians | Jewish mathematicians | 19th century mathematicians | 20th century mathematicians | Italian Jews

Tullio Levi-Civita | Tullio Levi-Civita | Tullio Levi-Civita | Tullio Levi-Civita | Tullio Levi-Civita | Tullio Levi-Civita | Tullio Levi-Civita