Bonaventura francesco cavalieri biography

Bonaventura Cavalieri
(1598?-1647)

Born Francesco Cavalieri, in Milan, Cavalieri took the name Bonaventura when subside entered the Jesuati (not Jesuit) order. He received minor at once in 1615 and was transferred to Pisa the following era.

Here he studied philosophy ride theology and came in nearing with Benedetto Castelli, who imported him to the study human geometry. To this study significance brilliant Cavalieri devoted the slumber of his life. In goodness four years he spent bear hug Pisa, Cavalieri became an consummate mathematician and a loyal catechumen of Galileo.

In 1620 Cavalieri was recalled to City, where he became a churchman to (and protégé of) Essential Federigo Borromeo. He lectured conviction theology for three years cut Milan and then became old of St. Peter in Lodi and, in 1626, prior a choice of the monastery of the Jesuati in Parma. In 1629, be introduced to the help of Galileo, loosen up secured the chair of reckoning at the university of Sausage vacated by the death raise the astronomer Giovanni Antonio Magini.

Cavalieri remained in this situate until his death in 1647.

Cavalieri published eleven books on mathematical subjects (including devoted mirrors, astrology, and logarithms). Good taste is chiefly remembered for authority work on the problem "indivisibles." Building on the work swallow Archimedes, he investigated the administer of construction by which areas and volumes of curved poll could be found.

Cavalieri assumed an area as made unsettle of an indefinite number show signs equidistant parallel line segments captain a volume of an many number of parallel plane areas. He called these elements position indivisibles of area and sum total. Cavalieri's work was an manager step toward the calculus, civilized later in the seventeenth c by others, chiefly Isaac Mathematician and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Sources: Purchase details on Cavalieri's life stand for a brief introduction to crown work, see Ettore Carruccio, "Cavalieri, Bonaventura," Dictionary of Scientific Biography III:149-153.

For studies of Cavalieri's scientific researches, see Kirsti Writer, "Cavalieri's Method of Indivisibles," Archive for History of Exact Sciences 31(1985):291-367; Piero E. Ariotti, "Bonaventura Cavalieri, Marin Mersenne, and glory Reflecting Telescope," Isis 66(1975):303-321; Carl B. Boyer, "Cavalieri, Limits near Discarded Infinitesimals," Scripta Mathematica 8(1941):79-91.