Person: Amoroso, Luigi
Luigi Amoroso was an Italian mathematician and economist who wrote on integral equatioins but is best known for his economic works.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Luigi was the eldest of his parents' six sons.
- Let us note at this point that there appears to be some confusion as to Luigi Amoroso's date of birth, some biographies giving 26 March 1886.
- Amoroso began his studies of mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1903.
- In 1909 three of Amoroso's papers were published.
- This shows that, at this early stage of his career, Amoroso was undertaking research in mathematical problems and also that he had become interested in mathematical economics, particularly through studying the work of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923).
- Despite the move from research in mathematics to research in mathematical economics, Amoroso still produced more papers on mathematics than on economics during this early part of his career.
- Although today Amoroso is remembered as a mathematical economist, despite his interest in this topic starting at the beginning of his career, his move towards this was slow with only a small proportion of his papers being on this topic for many years while he published more papers on mathematics and mathematical physics.
- In 1914 Amoroso was appointed to the chair of financial mathematics at the University of Bari.
- Amoroso"s digressions ...
- At this point Amoroso still believes in a distinction between industries with increasing returns to scale (manufacturing industry) and industries with decreasing returns to scale (agriculture), a notion which he would later dismiss in favour of a general U-shaped average cost curve.
- Mathematical economics, as an abstract analytical science, came for Amoroso to coincide with economic mechanics, that is, with the study of the relations between (psychological) forces on the basis of which the economic facts and the obstacles that oppose the action of these forces are produced: in every instant forces and obstacles determine the connections that are then realised among the quantities in the economy as a whole.
- Amoroso spent five years at the University of Naples before being appointed to the chair of economics in the Faculty of Political Science in the University of Rome in 1926.
- It is impossible to know whether Amoroso was a Fascist or whether he just found it to his advantage to praise Fascism.
- To understand Amoroso's connection with Italian Fascism, we need to look briefly at how that arose and its ideas.
- These were views which were supported by Amoroso who, like Pareto, felt that democracy had failed.
- Luigi Amoroso"s 1933 essay, written jointly with the one-time fascist minister of the economy Alberto de' Stefani, "La logica del sistema corporativo" Ⓣ(The logic of the corporate system), was a generally recognized synthesis of the debate on corporatism.
- Amoroso delivered lectures at the National Institute of Higher Mathematics in the academic year 1940-1941 and published them under the title Meccanica economica Ⓣ(Economic mechanics) (1942).
- Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of Amoroso's career is the fact that after the defeat of Fascism, he was able to continue to put forward economic views, with only a little change in emphasis, which were applauded by the anti-Fascists.
- Amoroso also engages in institutional analysis and, once again, moralistic advice, now exclusively based on conservative Catholic thinking, as represented, for instance, by Pope Pius XII.
- From 1944 Amoroso was director of the Institute of Economic and Financial Studies at the University of Rome and later became dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences.
- Although Amoroso was not a founding member of the Society, he was elected a fellow shortly after its founding.
- An interesting debate, in which Amoroso gave his views about mathematics and economics, occurred in 1953 when the Econometric Society reconsidered its criteria to select fellows.
- Amoroso had left Rome to return to the University of Bari in 1956 and he retired from Bari in 1959.
- One of the major honours given to Amoroso was an invitation to be a plenary 1-hour speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Bologna from 3 September to 10 September 1928.
- Amoroso received honorary degrees from many universities.
- We noted at the beginning of this article that there is some disagreement over the date of Amoroso's birth.
Born 23 May 1886, Naples, Italy. Died 28 October 1965, Naples, Italy.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Italy
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
