11 Facts About Eugenio Beltrami

Eugenio Beltrami was an Italian mathematician notable for his work concerning differential geometry and mathematical physics.

Eugenio Beltrami's work was noted especially for clarity of exposition.

Eugenio Beltrami developed singular value decomposition for matrices, which has been subsequently rediscovered several times.

Eugenio Beltrami was born in 1835 in Cremona, then a part of the Austrian Empire, and now part of Italy.

Eugenio Beltrami was appointed to the University of Bologna as a professor in 1862, the year he published his first research paper.

From 1891 until the end of his life, Eugenio Beltrami lived in Rome.

Eugenio Beltrami became the president of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1898 and a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1899.

In 1868 Beltrami published two memoirs dealing with consistency and interpretations of non-Euclidean geometry of Janos Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky.

However, John Stillwell remarks that Eugenio Beltrami must have been well aware of this difficulty, which is manifested by the fact that the pseudosphere is topologically a cylinder, and not a plane, and he spent a part of his memoir designing a way around it.

Eugenio Beltrami showed that n-dimensional Euclidean geometry is realized on a horosphere of the -dimensional hyperbolic space, so the logical relation between consistency of the Euclidean and the non-Euclidean geometries is symmetric.

Eugenio Beltrami acknowledged the influence of Bernhard Riemann's groundbreaking Habilitation lecture "On the hypotheses on which geometry is based".