Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti

Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti ( born April 18, 1791 in Novara, † March 20, 1863 in Pisa ) was an Italian physicist and astronomer (mathematical physics, celestial mechanics, geodesy, dielectrics).

Mossotti went to Novara to school and studied at the University of Pavia, where he earned his degree in 1811 with honors. In 1813 he went to the Observatory of Brera, where he had first scientific achievements. Since he was also politically active against the onset of reaction and had contacts with the revolutionary Filippo Buonarroti, he fell at the then prevailing there Austrian authorities suspected and had to flee abroad. About Switzerland and London in 1827, he went to Buenos Aires, where he was a professor at the university, and at the newly founded Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia an observatory, a weather station and an experimental physics laboratory operation. As the political situation and its working conditions deteriorated after a change of government in 1835, he went back to Italy. He went to Turin, where he published the essay Sur les forces qui régissent la constitution intérieure del corps (1836 ), the international recognition gave him, for example, by Michael Faraday. They gave him a professorship, which was founded in 1824 by Fredrick North Ionian University of Corfu. In 1840 he was appointed to Pisa, where he remained for the rest of his academic career as a professor of mathematical physics and celestial mechanics. He was there with his students Enrico Betti one of the founders of the mathematical tradition in Pisa. In the Italian Wars of Independence in 1848 he was commander of the battalion of the University of Pisa in the Battle of Goito against the Austrians at Curtatone and Montanara.

In 1859 he became a member of the State Council of Tuscany and in 1863 he became a senator of the Italian Republic.

Mossotti stood with his work in the tradition of the French school of theoretical physics ( André -Marie Ampère, Simeon Denis Poisson, Pierre Simon de Laplace ). The Clausius- Mossotti equation of physical chemistry ( theory of dielectrics) was named after Rudolf Clausius Mossotti and.

Writings

• Lezioni di fisica matematica elementari, Florence, 2 volumes, 1843, 1845