On the role of virtual work in Levi-Civita's parallel transport (Q332279)

The authors wish to give an additional interpretation to the traditional one about an important memoir by T. Levi-Civita in the Rendiconti Palermo of 1917. It has been known that Levi-Civita studied the curvature of four-dimensional Riemannian manifolds by modelling space-time through the parallel transport of vectors over these manifolds. He extended this to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds in 1917. The authors argue that Levi-Civita's strong education in mathematical physics tacitly influenced his formal reasoning by involving the principle of virtual work. The authors give a short overview of the history of that principle through P. Varignon and J. L. Lagrange. While the influence in the 1917 paper remains indirect the authors find more evidence for their thesis in a series of Spanish talks held by Levi-Civita in 1921, where the reference to analytical mechanics is more explicit.