Vito Volterra and the development of functional analysis

Publication date 12 March 2002

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

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 ``\dots 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.\dotsNEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe 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.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEAs 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.NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 0957.00059].

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