Antonio Signorini

Antonio Signorini (2 April 1888 – 23 February 1963) was an Italian mathematical physicist and civil engineer. He is known for his work in finite elasticity, thermoelasticity and for formulating the Signorini problem.

Life

Honors He was awarded the gold medal of the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL in 1920, while he was working at the University of Palermo: the members of the judging commission were Luigi Bianchi, Guido Castelnuovo and Tullio Levi-Civita.

In 1924, on 8 June, he was elected ordinary non resident member of the mathematics division of the Accademia Pontaniana.

On 30 May 1931 he was elected corresponding member of the Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti in Napoli: later on, precisely on 11 February 1933 and on 4 June 1949 he was elected, respectively, ordinary member and ordinary non resident member of the same academy.

He was elected corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei on July 15, 1935, and then national member on February 4, 1947. However, he was never awarded the royal prize of this academy, because he became a very early a member of it, thus losing the right to win a prize.

Work

Research activity His scientific production includes more than 114 works, being papers, monographs and textbooks, 17 of which have been collected in his "Opere Scelte" (Selected works).

Teaching activity Among his "allievi" there are some of the most important Italian mathematicians and mathematical physicists; a partial list of them is below:

Carlo Cattaneo Ida Cattaneo Gasparini Piero Giorgio Bordoni Giuseppe Grioli Giuseppe Tedone Carlo Tolotti

He was also a close friend and teacher of Gaetano Fichera at the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica, inspiring his research in continuum mechanics, his solution of the Signorini problem and the creation of the field of variational inequalities.

Selected publications . An important work, summarizing Signorini's approach to continuum mechanics of finite strains. . A volume collecting the most important works of Antonio Signorini with an introduction and a commentary of Giuseppe Grioli.