Giordano Riccati or Jordan Riccati (fl.

Floruit

Floruit , abbreviated fl. , is a Latin verb meaning "flourished", denoting the period of time during which something was active...

 1782) was the first experimental mechanician

Mechanician

A mechanician is an engineer or a scientist working in the field of mechanics, or in a related or sub-field: engineering or computational mechanics, applied mechanics, geomechanics, biomechanics, and mechanics of materials...

 to study material elastic moduli as we understand them today. His 1782 paper on determining the relative Young's moduli

Young's modulus

Young's modulus is a measure of the stiffness of an elastic material and is a quantity used to characterize materials. It is defined as the ratio of the uniaxial stress over the uniaxial strain in the range of stress in which Hooke's Law holds. In solid mechanics, the slope of the stress-strain...

 of steel and brass using flexural vibrations predated Thomas Young's

Thomas Young (scientist)

Thomas Young was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work...

 1807 paper on the subject of moduli. The ratio that Riccati found was
Even though the experiments were performed more than 200 years ago, this value is remarkably close to accepted values found in engineering handbooks in 2007.

Giordano Riccati was the son of the theoretical mechanician Jacopo Riccati

Jacopo Riccati

Jacopo Francesco Riccati was an Italian mathematician, born in Venice. He is now remembered for the Riccati equation. He died in Treviso in 1754.-Education:...

.