Vito Volterra

Abstract

Vito Volterra was born in Ancona on 3 May 1860, the only son of the merchant Abramo Volterra and Angelica Almagià. Volterra was only two when his father died, leaving him and his mother in dire financial straits, as a result of which they had to go and live at the house of his uncle, Alfonso Almagià, a Bank of Italy official. They moved first to Turin and then to Florence, where Volterra spent much of his youth and where he attended the Scuola Tecnica “Dante Alighieri” and later the Istituto Tecnico “Galileo Galilei”. Here he had a brilliant teacher, the physicist Antonio Roiti (1843-1921), who was to have a decisive influence on his education. Through Roiti he got a job as assistant in the Physics Laboratory of the University of Florence, thus avoiding the fate of having to become a bank clerk (to make both ends meet) and thus renounce his scientific studies for which he had such an extraordinary aptitude. He had already shown signs of this aptitude at the age of 13 when, after reading the Jules Verne novelFrom the Earth to the Moonhe had tackled the calculation of the trajectory of a projectile in the gravitational fields of the Earth and the Moon, that is, a restricted version of the extremely difficult three-body problem.