Person: Gerbaldi, Francesco
Francesco Gerbaldi was an Italian geometer best known for his construction of the so-called six mutually apolar conics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- In 1881 Gerbaldi published La superficie di Steiner studiata sulla sua rappresentazione analitica mediante le forme ternarie quadratiche Ⓣ(The surface of Steiner studied by its analytical representation by ternary quadratic forms) which contained his work on conic sections, projective geometry and projective planes.
- Gerbaldi left Turin to spend time at the University of Pavia, and he also went to Germany to learn about the latest mathematical advances.
- The Society soon lifted the status of mathematics at Palermo to a higher level and it was at this moment that Gerbaldi took up his chair.
- Gerbaldi demonstrated that one can take the conics as the symbols, that is Valentiner's group interchanges the conics ....
- Moreover, the conics were used for a construction of a point-line configuration studied by Gerbaldi.
- The set of intersection points of distinct Gerbaldi's conics consists of 60 points.
- From pure geometric consideration, without use of Gerbaldi's conics, the configuration was constructed by W Burnside, whose attention was concentrated on 45 points of the dual plane.
- We will call it as the Gerbaldi-Burnside configuration.
- Gerbaldi attended the first International Congresses of Mathematicians held in Zürich in 1897.
- Vito Volterra chaired the session at which Gerbaldi spoke.
- Gerbaldi finally departed from Palermo for Pavia in the autumn of 1908.
- Gerbaldi's departure from Palermo for Pavia in 1908 is vividly described in the above quote.
- The longest paper in the volume is by Gerbaldi himself.
- This is the paper Le frazione continue di Halphen and it was one of a series of three papers which Gerbaldi wrote on the continued fractions of George-Henri Halphen.
Born 29 July 1858, La Spezia (now Italy). Died 29 June 1934, Pavia, Italy.
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Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Italy
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
