In today's world, Vito Volterra is an issue that continues to gain relevance in society. Vito Volterra has long captured the interest of people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. Whether for its impressive technological advances, its controversial political decisions or its innovative artistic proposals, Vito Volterra never ceases to surprise and generate debate. Over the years, Vito Volterra has been a recurring topic in the media and has sparked the interest of researchers and academics from various disciplines. In this article, we will explore different aspects of Vito Volterra, analyzing its influence today and the possible repercussions it could have in the future.
Born in Ancona, then part of the Papal States, into a very poor Jewish family: his father was Abramo Volterra and his mother, Angelica Almagià. Abramo Volterra died in 1862 when Vito was two years old. The family moved to Turin, and then to Florence, where he studied at the Dante Alighieri Technical School and the Galileo Galilei Technical Institute.
Volterra showed early promise in mathematics before attending the University of Pisa, where he fell under the influence of Enrico Betti, and where he became professor of rational mechanics in 1883. He immediately started work developing his theory of functionals which led to his interest and later contributions in integral and integro-differential equations. His work is summarised in his book Theory of functionals and of Integral and Integro-Differential Equations (1930).
In 1892, he became professor of mechanics at the University of Turin and then, in 1900, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Volterra had grown up during the final stages of the Risorgimento when the Papal States were finally annexed by Italy and, like his mentor Betti, he was an enthusiastic patriot, being named by the king Victor Emmanuel III as a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1905. In the same year, he began to develop the theory of dislocations in crystals that was later to become important in the understanding of the behaviour of ductile materials. On the outbreak of World War I, already well into his 50s, he joined the Italian Army and worked on the development of airships under Giulio Douhet. He originated the idea of using inert helium rather than flammable hydrogen and made use of his leadership abilities in organising its manufacture. [citation needed]
After World War I, Volterra turned his attention to the application of his mathematical ideas to biology, principally reiterating and developing the work of Pierre François Verhulst. An outcome of this period is the Lotka–Volterra equations.
In 1922, he joined the opposition to the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and in 1931 he was one of only 12 out of 1,250 professors who refused to take a mandatory oath of loyalty. His political philosophy can be seen from a postcard he sent in the 1930s, on which he wrote what can be seen as an epitaph for Mussolini's Italy: Empires die, but Euclid’s theorems keep their youth forever. However, Volterra was no radical firebrand; he might have been equally appalled if the leftist opposition to Mussolini had come to power, since he was a lifelong royalist and nationalist. As a result of his refusal to sign the oath of allegiance to the fascist government he was compelled to resign his university post and his membership of scientific academies, and, during the following years, he lived largely abroad, returning to Rome just before his death.
He died in Rome on 11 October 1940. He is buried in the Ariccia Cemetery. The Academy organised his funeral.
Family
In 1900 he married Virginia Almagia, a cousin. Their son Edoardo Volterra (1904–1984) was a famous historian of Roman law.
Volterra also had a daughter, Luisa Volterra, who married Umberto d'Ancona. D'Ancona piqued his father-in-law's interest in biomathematics when he showed Vito a set of data regarding populations of different species of fish in the Adriatic Sea, where decreased fishing activity from the war had led to an increase in the populations of predatory fish species. Vito published an analysis of the dynamics of interacting species of fish the next year.
^Borsellino, A. (1980). "Vito Volterra and Contemporary Mathematical Biology". In Barigozzi, Claudio (ed.). Vito Volterra Symposium on Mathematical Models in Biology. New York: Springer. pp. 410–417. ISBN0-387-10279-5.
^According to Accardi (1992, p. 150). Precisely, Accardi's analysis of the contribution of Volterra to the founding of functional analysis is aimed to show that he was the sole founder of the field, and to stimulate the readers to read Volterra's original papers.
^Sturm, Fritz (1987). "Edoardo Volterra (1904–1984)". Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Romanistische Abteilung (in German). 104 (1): 918‐926. doi:10.7767/zrgra.1987.104.1.918. S2CID180699084.
Gemelli, Agostino (1942), "La relazione del presidente" [The president's relation] (PDF), Acta Pontificia Academia Scientarum, 6: XI–XXIV. The commemorative address pronounced by Agostino Gemelli on the occasion of the first seance of the fourth academic year of Pontificial Academy of Sciences: it includes his commemoration of various deceased members.
Pancaldi, Giuliano (1993), "Vito volterra: Cosmopolitan Ideals and Nationality in the Italian Scientific Community between the Belle époque and the First World War", Minerva, 31 (1): 21–37, doi:10.1007/BF01096170, ISSN0026-4695, S2CID144918235.
Israel, G. (1988). "On the contribution of Volterra and Lotka to the development of modern biomathematics". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 10 (1): 37–49. PMID3045853.