Background
Levi-Civita was born on March 29, 1873, in Padua, Veneto, Italy, to Giacomo Levi-Civita, an eminent lawyer who was later appointed to the Italian Senate.
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University of Padua
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University of Rome
mathematician scientist author
Levi-Civita was born on March 29, 1873, in Padua, Veneto, Italy, to Giacomo Levi-Civita, an eminent lawyer who was later appointed to the Italian Senate.
In 1890 Tullio Levi-Civita enrolled in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Padua. He graduated from it in 1892 and in 1894 he earned a teaching diploma.
Levi-Civita began his teaching career at a Padua-based teacher-training college in 1895. A year later, he published his first piece dealing with what would be his most important contribution to mathematics: tensor calculus.
Levi-Civita began teaching at the University of Padua in 1898 and he served as the chair of mechanics. Around 1900, he and Curbasto jointly published the progress they had made in the development of absolute differential calculus in the Meaethodes de calcul differeaentiel absolu et leurs applications (“Methods of the Absolute Differential Calculus and Their Applications”). They had been working on this calculus together for several years.
In 1902 Levi-Civita became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Padua, a position he held until 1918. His contributions to science were not limited to absolute differential calculus. Two subjects in which he showed extreme interest in and did the most work on while at Padua were celestial mechanics and hydrodynamics. From 1903 to 1916 Levi-Civita studied various aspects of celestial mechanics. He was especially concerned with the three-body problem (how three bodies move when considered as mass centres and under Newton’s mutual attraction theories). He achieved results on the problem from 1914 to 1916, but graciously admitted another scholar, Karl. F. Sundmann, had reached the same conclusions in a roundabout manner. Levi-Civita also published relevant work on hydrodynamics, a subject of which he was particularly fond, from 1906 on. He focused on concepts such as how an immersed solid’s translational movements relate to the resistance of a liquid.
Before leaving Padua with his wife in 1917, Levi-Civita published his most important solo work in absolute differential calculus. In it, he promulgated the idea of parallel displacement and its place in curved space. It was this breakthrough that helped Einstein with the mathematical models of relativity. Parallel displacement had relevancy in other areas as well; in pure mathematics, it affected the growth of the theory of modern differential as applied to generalized spaces in topology and the geometry of paths. The scholarly discourse that rose from Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus influenced its evolution into tensor calculus. Tensor calculus is used by mathematicians in the derivation of gravitation and electromagnetism unified theories.
Levi-Civita left Padua in 1918 to become a professor of higher analysis at the University of Rome. In 1920, he became a professor of rational mechanics, a post he served at until he was forced to retire in 1938.
An outspoken opponent of fascism, Levi-Civita was forced out of his professorship and into retirement in 1938 because of anti-Semitic laws. His membership in scientific societies of Italy was also revoked.
Levi-Civita was a member of the Royal Society of London since 1930. He was also a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the London Mathematical Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Mathematical Society till 1938.
Levi-Civita was widely honoured and respected for his character, his broad outlook on science, and his natural aptitude as teacher and inspirer of subsequent generations of mathematicians.
Levi-Civita married one of his students, Libera Trevisani, in 1914. The couple had no children.