Beppo Levi | |
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| Born | (1875-05-14)May 14, 1875 |
| Died | August 28, 1961(1961-08-28) (aged 86) |
| Alma mater | University of Turin |
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| Doctoral advisor | Corrado Segre |
Beppo Levi (14 May 1875 – 28 August 1961) was anItalianmathematician. He published high-level academic articles and books onmathematics as well as onphysics,history,philosophy, andpedagogy. Levi was a member of theBologna Academy of Sciences and of theAccademia dei Lincei.
Beppo Levi was born on May 14, 1875, inTurin, Italy to aJewish family. He was an older brother ofEugenio Elia Levi.[1] Levi obtained hislaurea in mathematics in 1896 at age 21 from theUniversity of Turin underCorrado Segre.[1][2] He was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Turin three months later and shortly thereafter became a full-time Scholar.[1] Levi was appointed Professor at theUniversity of Piacenza in 1901, at theUniversity of Cagliari in 1906, at theUniversity of Parma in 1910, and finally at theUniversity of Bologna in 1928.[3] The years that followed his last appointment saw the rise ofBenito Mussolini's power and ofantisemitism in Italy, and Levi, being Jewish, was soon expelled from his position at the University of Bologna.[3] He emigrated toArgentina, as did many other European Jews at that time.
Levi chose Argentina as a destination because of an invitation by the engineer Cortés Plá,dean of theFacultad de Ciencias Matemáticas, Físico-Químicas y Naturales Aplicadas a la Industria at theUniversidad Nacional del Litoral (currentlyFacultad de Ciencias Exactas, Ingeniería y Agrimensura at theUniversidad Nacional de Rosario) in the city of Rosario. Cortés Plá invited Levi to come to Rosario to head the recently created Instituto de Matemática. It was there that Levi did most of his work from 1939 until his death in 1961.
While living in Rosario, Levi joined a group of mathematicians that includedLuis Santaló, Simón Rubinstein, Juan Olguín, Enrique Ferrari, Fernando and Enrique Gaspar, Mario Castagnino and Edmundo Rofman. In 1940 Levi foundedMathematicae Notae, the first mathematical journal in Argentina.[4] In 1956 he was awarded theFeltrinelli Prize.[4]
He died on August 28, 1961, inRosario, Argentina, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery there.[4]
His early work studiedsingularities onalgebraic curves andsurfaces.[5] In particular, he supplied a proof (questioned by some) that a procedure forresolution of singularities onalgebraic surfaces terminates in finitely many steps.[5] Later he proved some foundational results concerningLebesgue integration, including what is commonly known asBeppo Levi's lemma.[6]
He also studied the arithmetic ofelliptic curves. He classified them up to isomorphism, not only overC, but also overQ. Next he studied what in modern terminology would be the subgroup of rational torsion points on an elliptic curve overQ: he proved that certain groups were realizable and that others were not. He essentially formulated thetorsion conjecture for elliptic curves over the rational numbers, providing a complete list of possibilities should be, which was formulated independently byAndrew Ogg about 60 years later and finally proved byBarry Mazur in 1973.[7]
Media related toBeppo Levi at Wikimedia Commons
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link). Theweb site of a scientific meeting inBologna, honouring the memory of Beppo Levi.