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Vito Volterra and the development of functional analysis. (English) Zbl 0980.01016

International conference in memory of Vito Volterra. Papers of the conference, Rome, Italy, October 8-11, 1990. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Atti Convegni Lincei. 92, 151-181 (1992).
Vito Volterra (1860-1940) can be considered to be the founder of the discipline now called functional analysis (term used first by Paul Levy). He started the work in 1883 whose results appeared in the six notes published in Rendiconti dell’ Accademia dei Lincei in 1887. He describes the goal of his first note as “…to clarify some concepts which I believe necessary to introduce, for an extension of Riemann’s theory of functions of complex variables and which I believe might be profitable in various other researches too.…”
The present article is a good survey of Volterra’s contribution to functional analysis. The author does not claim it to be exhaustive or systematic, for the bibliography of related papers of Volterra, he refers to the obituary essays by Joseph Peres in the first volume of his Opere Complete and by Edmund Whittaker in the Dover edition of Volterra’s Theory of Functionals.
As the present author remarks, the work of Volterra in functional analysis is only a tiny fraction of his impressive activity in several fields of mathematics as well as in the political, administrative and cultural life of his times.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 0957.00059].

MSC:

01A55 History of mathematics in the 19th century
01A60 History of mathematics in the 20th century

Biographic References:

Volterra, V.
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