Abstract
In the spring of 1860, Ancona was living out its final months under the dominion of the Papal States, which was destined to end the following September. It was in this city in the Marches that Vito Volterra was born, on 3 May 1860.
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- 1.
The first ‘ghetto’ for Jews was established in Venice in the fourteenth century; from here the name given to the confined area in which the Jews were forced to live spread throughout the world. The Jewish communities of Ancona and Rome were the only ones saved in 1569, when a decree issued by Pope Pius V expelled the Jews from the Papal State. The Ancona ghetto was abolished in 1848, but in actual fact the Jews continued to be confined to the area that had always been assigned to them, on the slopes of Monte Guasco, one of the two plateaus that make up the city of Ancona.
- 2.
This piece of information and others concerning Volterra’s family are drawn from the book by Judith Goldstein, The Volterra Chronicles (Providence: American Mathematical Society–London Mathematical Society, 2007).
- 3.
Angelica Almagià’s father, Vito Almagià (1797–1843), was a teacher in one of the Jewish schools in the ghetto.
- 4.
See ‘Matériaux pour une biographie du mathématicien Vito Volterra’, Archeion 23 (1941): pp. 325–359. This autobiographical recollection was written anonymously; the author may have been either Joseph Pérès or Elena Freda. The French mathematician Pérès, who we will learn more about in chapter VIII in particular, enjoyed a long, affectionate friendship with Volterra and his wife Virginia. Freda (1890–1978), who earned a degree in mathematics under the advisement of Guido Castelnuovo, was the author of a 1937 book (in French, with a preface by Volterra) on hyperbolic partial differential equations.
- 5.
See Goodstein, The Volterra Chronicles, op. cit. The work by Volterra cited by Goodstein is ‘L’évolution des idées fondamentales du calcul infinitésimal’, in Leçons sur les fonctions des lignes edited by J. Pérès (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1913).
- 6.
Ròiti’s letter is dated September 1877. It is part of the collection of Volterra’s correspondence housed in the ‘Fondo Volterra’ of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Some of this correspondence has already been published. See in particular the large selection published in the exhibition catalogue Vito Volterra e il suo tempo (1860–1940). Mostra storico-documentaria edited by Giovanni Paoloni (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1990), which also contains the letter by Alfonso Almagià quoted earlier. Many of the other letters which will be quoted further along are published in their entirety in this catalogue.
- 7.
The Associazione Mathesis was founded in 1895 as a national association of mathematics teachers.
- 8.
All of Volterra’s publications are collected in the five volumes of the Opere matematiche published by the Accademia dei Lincei (1954–1962).
- 9.
From Luigi Bianchi, ‘In memoria di Ulisse Dini’, published in vol. 1 of Ulisse Dini Opere (Rome: Cremonese, 1953).
- 10.
Bianchi, ‘In memoria di Ulisse Dini’, op. cit.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Guerraggio, A., Paoloni, G. (2012). Chronicles of Italian Life. In: Vito Volterra. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27263-9_1
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