Francesco Gerbaldi

Francesco Gerbaldi ( born July 29, 1858 in La Spezia, † June 29, 1934 in Pavia ) was an Italian mathematician who dealt with algebraic geometry.

Gerbaldi studied at the University of Turin with the Laurea degree in 1879 and was then assistant to Enrico D' Ovidio there in Turin had some time to further study in Germany, was in Pavia and Rome before to 1890 after winning a competition Professor the University of Palermo. He was there colleague of Giovanni Guccia, founder of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, and promoted the reputation of the Faculty of Mathematics of the University by bringing mathematicians such as Giuseppe Bagnera, Michele De Franchis, Pasquale Calapso and Michele Cipolla. In 1908 he moved to the University of Pavia. In 1931, he went into retirement.

He is known for the set of Gerbaldi, the construction of six pairwise linearly independent quadrics apolar ( non-degenerate ternary quadratic forms ). Later he examined the symmetry groups of the six quadrics and found in 1898 that this is the Valentiner group, a Valentiner by the Danish mathematician Herman ( 1850-1913 ) in 1889 found and further investigated by Anders Wiman finite group of order 1080 of isomorphic to the Alternating Group six elements, and is a subset of the automorphisms of the complex projective plane.

In 1897 he gave a lecture on the first International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich ( Sul gruppo di semplice 360 collineazione piane ).