The life of Vito Volterra, one of the finest
scientists and mathematicians Italy ever produced, spans the period
from the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1860 to the onset of
the Second World War—an era of unparalleled progress and
unprecedented turmoil in the history of Europe. Born into an Italian
Jewish family in the year of the liberation of Italy's Jewish ghettos,
Volterra was barely in his twenties when he made his name as a
mathematician and took his place as a leading light in Italy's modern
scientific renaissance. By his early forties, he was a world-renowned
mathematician, a sought-after figure in European intellectual and
social circles, the undisputed head of Italy's mathematics and physics
school—and still living with his mother, who decided the time
was ripe to arrange his marriage. When Italy entered World War I in
1915, the fifty-five-year-old Volterra served with distinction and
verve as a lieutenant and did not put on civilian clothes again until
the Armistice of 1918. By 1925, he was president of the world's oldest
scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei, the founder and
president of Italy's National Research Council, a mentor to the
brilliant and restless Enrico Fermi, and “Mr. Italian
Science” to the rest of the world. But none of this was enough
to keep the government of Benito Mussolini from stripping him of all
his honors and affiliations in 1931, when he was one of only twelve
professors in the entire country to refuse to sign an oath of loyalty
to the Fascist regime.
This book, based in part on unpublished personal letters and
interviews, traces the extraordinary life and times of one of Europe's
foremost scientists and mathematicians, from his teenage struggles to
avoid the stifling life of a “respectable” bank clerk in
Florence, to his seminal mathematical work—which today
influences fields as diverse as economics, physics, and
ecology—and from his spirited support of Italy's scientific and
democratic institutions during his years as an Italian Senator, to his
steadfast defiance of the Fascists and Mussolini. In recounting the
life of this outstanding scientist, European Jewish intellectual,
committed Italian patriot, and devoted if frequently distracted family
man, The Volterra Chronicles depicts a remarkable individual in
a prodigious age and takes the reader on a vivid and splendidly
detailed historical journey.
Readership
Undergraduates interested in history and the history of
mathematics.