Lorenzo Mascheroni
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
.
He was born near Bergamo
Bergamo
Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...
, Lombardy
Lombardy
Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest in the whole of Europe...
. At first mainly interested in the humanities (poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
language), he eventually became professor of mathematics at Pavia
Pavia
Pavia , the ancient Ticinum, is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy, northern Italy, 35 km south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It is the capital of the province of Pavia. It has a population of c. 71,000...
.
In his Geometria del Compasso (Pavia, 1797), he proved that any geometrical construction which can be done with compass and straightedge
Compass and straightedge
Compass-and-straightedge or ruler-and-compass construction is the construction of lengths, angles, and other geometric figures using only an idealized ruler and compass....
, can also be done with compasses alone. However, the priority for this result (now known as the Mohr–Mascheroni theorem
Mohr–Mascheroni theorem
In mathematics, the Mohr–Mascheroni theorem states that any geometric construction that can be performed by a compass and straightedge can be performed by a compass alone. The result was originally published by Georg Mohr in 1672, but his proof languished in obscurity until 1928. The theorem was...
) belongs to the Dane
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
Georg Mohr
Georg Mohr
Jørgen Mohr was a Danish mathematician. He travelled in the Netherlands, France, and England.Mohr was born in Copenhagen...
, who had previously published a proof in 1672.
In his Adnotationes ad calculum integrale Euleri (1790) he published a calculation of what is now known as the Euler–Mascheroni constant
Euler–Mascheroni constant
The Euler–Mascheroni constant is a mathematical constant recurring in analysis and number theory, usually denoted by the lowercase Greek letter ....
, usually denoted as γ (gamma).
He died in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.