Tommaso Ceva
Tommaso Ceva (December 20, 1648 – February 3, 1737) was an Italian Jesuit mathematician from Milan. He was the brother of Giovanni Ceva. His work aided in spreading a knowledge of Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation.
Tommaso Ceva | |
|---|---|
 Tommaso Ceva | |
| Born | December 20, 1648 |
| Died | February 3, 1737 (aged 88) Milan, Duchy of Milan |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Parent(s) | Carlo Francesco Ceva and Paola Ceva (née de' Colombi) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | mathematics |
| Institutions | Brera College |
| Notable students | |
Biography
Tommaso Ceva was born into a wealthy Milanese family in 1648. After studying at the Collegio di Brera, a Jesuit college in Milan, on 24 March 1663 he entered the Society of Jesus. He taught mathematics and rhetoric at the Jesuit College of Brera in Milan for thirty-eight years. His most famous student was Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri. He was one the main representatives of Celia Grillo Borromeo's Academia Vigilantium. Joseph I named Ceva Caesarian Theologian early in the 18th century. His first scientific work, De natura gravium (1669), dealt with physical subjects - such as gravity and free fall - in a philosophical way. His only mathematical work, published in 1699 was the Opuscula Mathematica which dealt with geometry, gravity and arithmetic. Ceva designed an instrument to divide a right angle into a specified number of equal parts. He was also a noted poet and dedicated a significant amount of his time to this task. His Latin poem Jesus Puer, dedicated to the Holy Roman emperor Joseph I, was translated into many languages including German and Italian. He was made a fellow of the Arcadia in 1718 and was in correspondence with Vincenzo Viviani and Luigi Guido Grandi. He was a close friend of the mathematician Pietro Paolo Caravaggio and his son. Ceva was a member of Celia Grillo Borromeo's Academy of the Vigilanti.
He died in Milan in 1737.
Bibliography
- Argelati, Filippo (1745). Bibliotheca scriptorum mediolanesium. Milan. pp. 417–20.
- Riccardi, Pietro (1870). Biblioteca matematica italiana. Vol. 1. Modena. pp. 343–4.
- Sommervogel, Carlos (1891). Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus. Vol. 2. Brusels. pp. 1015–24.
- Ramat, Raffaello, "La critica del padre Ceva," Civiltà moderna, 10 (1938), 385-95, and 11 (1939), 139-66. (Reprinted in Sette contributi agli studi di storia della letteratura italiana, (Florence, 1947), pp. 5-44.
- Canziani, Guido, "Descartes e Gassendi nella Philosophia Novo-antiqua di Tommaso Ceva," in Per una storia critica della scienza, ed. Marco Beretta, Felice Mondella, and Maria Teresa Monti (Bologna: Cisalpino, 1997), 139-64.
- Haskell, Yasmin, "Sleeping with the Enemy: Tommaso Ceva's Use and Abuse of Lucretius in the Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan, 1704)," in What Nature Does Not Teach Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Earby Modern Periods, ed. Juanita Ruys (Turnhout Brepols, 2008), 497-520.
External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Tommaso Ceva", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews
- Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
- Gronda, Giovanna (1980). "CEVA, Tommaso". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 24: Cerreto–Chini (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.