Professor in Pisa

Young Vito, student at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, graduated in physics in 1882 with a thesis on hydrodynamics written under the advisement of Enrico Betti. Other graduates from the Scuola Normale in the 1880s included Salvatore Pincherle, Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, Luigi Bianchi, Carlo Somigliana and Mario Pieri, and later, in the 1890s, Federigo Enriques, Gaetano Scorza and Guido Fubini. Each one of these is a ‘luminary’ in the history of mathematics, and they provide excellent testimony to the level of the Scuola Normale. In the previous chapter, we mentioned the teaching faculty that Volterra found when he enrolled in the Scuola Normale. Above all, it was Dini and Betti who provided the orientation for his early choices. They also contributed to making Pisa a major centre for Italian mathematics, which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, would generally be acknowledged as third in the ideal ranking of mathematics by country, after France and Germany. This is a significant achievement for a mathematics that had essentially begun from scratch, in 1860, at the time of Italian unification!