LOOKING FOR GALILEO (and Italian mathematicians): Italy’17 travel blog

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

Today I’m going to write about (the maths part of) my trip to Italy last summer, which I did with my extended family (we were 12!) to celebrate my grandparent’s wedding 50th anniversary.

Keep reading for an overview of the most famous italian mathmos, and what we found (or didn’t find!) about them and their hometowns.

We flew to Milan and then, after a brief walk through Verona, we headed ourselves to Venice. Of course, Venice was awesome and beautiful, although there’s not a lot maths stuff to tell, but one thing. This mosaic by Paolo Uccello at Saint Mark’s Cathedral is the earliest example (around 1430) of a stellated Platonic solid (dodecahedron here).

After a couple of nights there, we continued our journey, and stopped by Padua (/Padova), hometown of Levi-Civita (the Levi-Civita symbol is my torment in Vectors & Matrices)There is a huge -actually the biggest in Italy- elliptical square (this sounds contradictory in English language) with statues of notorious italians from centuries ago. It took me a while, but I did found Galileo Galilei! On him, more to follow.

Next stop for lunch was Bolongnia, aka the place where the first ever university in the world was founded. It was also the university of one of the best women mathematicians ever: Maria Gaetana Agnesi.   I first read about her after finding this nice doodle about one of her findings known as Which of Agnesi due to a traslation mistake!!

After Bolognia, we arrived to Pisa (hometown of Fibonacci!), where we saw the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa. Standing at the top and throwing objects with different weights, Galileo realised that the time needed to reach the ground was independent of the weight, laying the foundations for newtonian dynamics.

And from there, we got to Florence. We saw Michelangelo’s David and many more beautiful places, but it would go far beyond the scope of this blog, so I shall focus on the maths part here, which is again Galileo. Near Ponte Vecchio, I found Galileo Galilei’s museum, featuring drawings of the moons he had discovered with his own telescope. And of course, his grave at the stunning Duomo.

He was condened to death by the catholic church, for denying the geocentric model. For the same reason, Giordano Bruno, an advocate of the Heliocentric model, was burned in Campo de’ Fiori, Rome, our next city.

There was no more maths at all in the rest of the trip, but for completeness I shall say that we went to Pompeii, Napoli and Capri too!

Being so excited for this trip as I was, it’s easy to understand that I wasn’t very keen on having a wikipedia search about italian mathematicians. If you had asked me for a name, the first one to come to my mind would most likely have been (Paolo) Ruffini. Ruffini’s rule made my life easier almost daily for 4 years and so I couldn’t forget about him. So yes, I was a bit dissapointed for finding nothing at all about him there!

It’s worth saying that Leonardo Da Vinci was everywhere around Italy, and he was great in almost everything, but not very keen on maths 😦

I also would have enjoyed something related to Tartaglia and Cardano, whose story I might write about in the future!

I hope you enjoyed the post despite being that long!

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