Tullio Levi-Civita

Tullio Levi-Cività (March 29, 1873 - December 29, 1941) was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on tensor calculus but who also made significant contributions in other areas, some related to this work and some not.

He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor (some say co-inventor with Levi-Civita) of the tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics (notably on the three-body problem) and hydrodynamics.

Levi-Cività personally helped Albert Einstein to learn the tensor calculus, on which Einstein was to base general relativity, and which he had struggled to master.

His textbook on tensor calculus The Absolute Differential Calculus (originally a set of lecture notes in Italian co-authored with Ricci-Curbastro) remains one of the standard texts more than a century after its first publication, with several translations available.

See also

• Levi-Civita connection
• Levi-Civita symbol

External links

• Scienceworld biography
• A more complete biography
• Another short biography