The Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli died in Florence
Havana, Cuba. Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, born in Faenza, Italy on October 15, 1608. He invented the mercury scale in 1643. In 1627 he was sent to Rome to study science with the Benedictine Benedetto Castelli, invited by Urban VII to study mathematics at the Colegio de la Sapienza and one of the first disciples of Galileo.
He studied a work by Galileo Galilei, The Dialogue of New Science, which inspired the development of some of the mechanical principles that were exposed there and which he collected in his De motu. In 1632 Castelli called Galileo to show him his pupil’s work and ask him to accept it, a proposal to which Galileo agreed, so Torricelli moved to Archietri, where he served as Galileo’s employee for the last three months of his life. wise.
After Galileo’s death, Torricelli, who wanted to return to Rome, yielded to the offers of Ferdinando II de ‘Medici and was appointed philosopher and mathematician of the Grand Duke and professor of mathematics at the Academy of Florence, settling permanently in that city. In 1643 Torricelli used mercury by making it rise in a closed tube, creating a vacuum in the upper part, pushed by the weight of the air in the atmosphere. He proved that air has weight and invented the barometer. The tor pressure unit was named in his memory.
Torricelli’s theory is an application of Bernoulli’s principle and studies the flow of a fluid in a vessel, through a small hole, under the influence of gravity. He has published his work on movement under the title Opera geometrica.
The publication of works on the properties of annular curves, together with this numerous work, to a bitter dispute with Roberval, who accused him of plagiarizing his solutions to the problem of squaring these curves. Discussion on the scoop continued until his death. Among his discoveries is the principle that if a series of bodies are connected in such a way that the center of gravity, due to its movement, cannot rise or fall, then these bodies are in equilibrium.
He also discovered that the envelope of all parabolic trajectories directly from bullets fired from one point with speed, but in different directions, is a parabola of revolution. Likewise, he used and perfected Cavalieri’s indivisible method. He also made important improvements to the telescope and microscope, with many lenses made and engraved with his name still preserved in Florence.
Evangelista Torricelli died at the age of 39 in Florence on 25 October 1647, a few days after contracting typhoid fever. He was buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo.