Mathematics and Art: The Film Series

Abstract

The “Mathematics and Art” project started in 1976. Or better, that year I started thinking of the project. The reasons why I started thinking of it are essentially two, or perhaps three. The first: in 1976, I was at the University of Trento, in the North of Italy. I was working in that area called the Calculus of Variations, in particular Minimal Surfaces and Capillarity problems. I had graduated from the University of Rome in 1970 and started my career at the University of Ferrara, where I was very lucky to start working with Mario Miranda, the favourite graduate student of Ennio De Giorgi; then I met Enrico Giusti and Enrico Bombieri. It was the period in which in the investigations of Partial Differential Equations, of the Calculus of Variations and the Perimeter theory, first introduced by Renato Caccioppoli and then developed by De Giorgi and Miranda, the Italian school of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa was one of the best in the world. And in the year 1976, Enrico Bombieri received the Fields medal. By chance I was in the right place at the right time. All the mathematicians world-wide who were working in these areas of research had to be updated about what was happening in Italy. In July 2000, I participated in the annual congress of the American Mathematical Society in Los Angeles, entitled “Challenges for the 2000”. Many of the invited speakers were asked to provide a survey of the researches in the last 50 years. Those who talked of Partial differential Equations, Calculus of Variations and Minimal Surfaces like Karen Ulhenbeck, Haim Brezis and Jean Taylor, all recalled the group of mathematicians from Pisa, born around the famous Ennio De Giorgi, and its great scientific relevance.