Vincenzo Viviani (April 5, 1622 – September 22, 1703) was an Italian mathematician and scientist. He was a pupil of Torricelli and Galileo.

Biography

Vincenzo Viviani was born in Florence to the nobles Jacopo di Michelangelo Viviani and Maria Alamanno del Nente. While attending a Jesuit school Viviani studied the humanities. Following the study of humanities, Viviani turned to mathematics. He studied geometry under the instruction of Galilean follower Clemente Settimi. It was through Clemente that Viviani would gain recognition and meet Clemente's instructor, Tuscan Court mathematician Famiano Michelini. Apart from being Galileo's disciple, Viviani became a pupil of Evangelista Torricelli and worked on physics and geometry.

One of the primary interests of Viviani was the study of the mathematics of the ancients. Viviani spent much of his life restoring the works of Aristaeus the Elder and Apollonius.

In 1660, Viviani and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli conducted an experiment to determine the speed of sound. Timing the difference between the seeing the flash and hearing the sound of a cannon shot at a distance, they calculated a value of 350 meters per second (m/s), considerably better than the previous value of 478 m/s obtained by Pierre Gassendi.

By 1666, Viviani started to receive many job offers as his reputation as a mathematician grew. That same year, Louis XIV of France offered him a position at the Académie Royale and John II Casimir Vasa of Poland offered Viviani a post as his astronomer. Fearful of losing Viviani, the Grand Duke appointed him First Mathematician of the Tuscan Court. English translation, "Historical Account of the Life of Galileo Galilei", in On the Life of Galileo: Vincenzo Viviani's Historical Account and Other Early Biographies, edited, translated and annotated by Stefano Gattei, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, pp. 1–93.

  • "Relazione intorno al riparare per quanto possibile sia la città e campagne di Pisa dall'inondazioni" (April 12, 1684)

See also

  • Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment
  • Viviani's theorem
  • Viviani's curve

References

  • Viviani page at Rice University's Galileo Project
  • Viviani's Theorem