Francesco Brioschi

Francesco Brioschi ( born December 22, 1824 in Milan, † December 13, 1897 in Milan ) was an Italian mathematician, mathematics in Italy coined organizationally crucial in the 19th century.

Life and work

Brioschi visited the University of Padua, where he received his doctorate in 1845 with Antonio Bordoni ( 1789-1860 ) and in particular studied the works of Joseph -Louis Lagrange and Augustin Louis Cauchy. 1852 to 1861 he taught applied mathematics (including mechanics, astronomy, architecture) at the University of Padua. In 1858 he visited together with Enrico Betti of Pisa and his students Felice Casorati the Universities of Paris, Göttingen and Berlin. Especially the encounter with Bernhard Riemann in Göttingen was momentous. With Betti he began to translate his work and lecturing about his theories. This is often seen as the beginning of a distinctly Italian development in mathematics in the 19th century, with a particular focus in algebraic geometry. Even before the unification of Italy, he was by Count Cavour ( such as Giuseppe Verdi ) appointed a committee to education reform in 1859, which should act like the Humboldtian reforms in Prussia.

1861/62 he was State Secretary in the Ministry of Education and founder in 1863 of the Polytechnic in Milan, where he remained until his death professor of mathematics and hydraulics as well as rector. Its hydraulic engineering lectures contributed in particular fruit when, on the initiative of the Rector of the Polytechnic Giuseppe Colombo (1836-1921), a student of Brioschi, who also studied with Edison, 1883 in northern Italy, the first electric hydropower plants were built in Europe. As a hydraulic engineer he was involved in work on the regulation of the Po and the Tiber, whose floods caused widespread damage regularly. He was also more politically active in the reform of the school system. In 1865, he was Italian senator.

Brioschi wrote in 1854 a book on the theory of determinants and 1858-1861, a four -volume work on the invariant theory of binary quadratic forms. In 1858 he gave a solution of the quintic equation with elliptic functions ( at the same time also gave Leopold Kronecker a solution ). He also investigated the solution of the equation of the sixth degree, and proved that the solution of special equations of the sixth degree with hyperelliptic functions that Heinrich Maschke scored 1888 is expandable to all equations of the sixth degree. He also wrote an edition of Euclid for Italian schools and published the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci. 1867 to 1877 he published the Annali di matematica pura e applicata he made to a respected mathematical journal in Europe. In 1870 he became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, whose president he became in 1884.

More of his graduate students next Casorati were Eugenio Beltrami (1856 ) and Luigi Cremona (1853 ).