Levi-Civita, Tullio (1873-1941)

Italian mathematician who developed, in collaboration with Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the absolute differential calculus, published 1900. Levi-Civita also introduced the concept of parallelism in curved space 1917. Levi-Civita was born and educated in Padua, where he was taught by Ricci-Curbastro. He was professor at the Engineering School in Padua 1897-1918, when he became professor of higher analysis at Rome. In 1938, the anti-Semitic laws promulgated by the Fascist government forced him to leave the university; he was also expelled from all Italian scientific societies. The absolute differential calculus was a completely new calculus, applicable to both Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Most significantly, it could be applied to Riemannian curved spaces, and would be fundamental to Albert Einstein's development of the general theory of relativity. Levi-Civita's idea of parallel displacement later developed into tensor calculus. Levi-Civita also published papers on celestial mechanics and hydrodynamics. His achievements in both pure and applied mathematics established him as one of the foremost mathematicians of his age.