Vitali's generalized absolute differential calculus (Q2069715)

Giuseppe Vitali (1875--1932) is best known for his many remarkable contributions to analysis, including in particular his discovery of a non-Lebesgue measurable set (1905). In the last decade of his life, Vitali's research interests turned to differential geometry. This very interesting paper focuses on Vitali's contributions to this subject by analyzing both his introduction of a covariant derivative that describes a parallelism with vanishing curvature and non-vanishing torsion, and his generalized absolute differential calculus, namely the higher-order extension of Ricci's absolute differential calculus that he developed. The paper under review offers a detailed and insightful analysis of Vitali's work. In addition, it provides an accurate account of Ernesto Pascal's theory of higher-order differential forms, which was at the origin of Vitali's calculus. Eventually, Enea Bortolotti's investigation of the geometrical aspects of Vitali's theory is briefly discussed.