Ramiro Rampinelli

Ramiro Rampinelli (10 August 16978 February 1759), born Lodovico Rampinelli, was an Italian mathematician and physicist. He was a monk in the Olivetan Order. He had a decisive influence on the spread of mathematical analysis, algebra and mathematical physics in the best universities of Italy. He is one of the best-known Italian scholars in the field of infinitesimal mathematics of the first half of the 18th century.

Biography He was born in Brescia into the noble Rampinelli family and educated by the Jesuits; he learned the rudiments of mathematics from Giovan Battista Mazini.

He studied first at the University of Bologna, where he was a disciple of Gabriele Manfredi, and took his monastic vows on 1 November 1722 at San Michele in Bosco.

In 1731 he was in Rome for a year, spending time with Celestino Galiani and Antonio Leprotti, studying subjects including architecture.

In 1740, after a stay at the monastery of St. Francis in Brescia, he transferred to the Olivetan monastery of San Vittore al Corso in Milan, where he was also mathematics tutor to the noblewoman Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who remembered him with gratitude in the preface to her Instituzioni Analitiche per la gioventù d'Italia.

In 1747, the Senate of Milan appointed him (at double salary) to the chair in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Pavia. His expertise in river hydraulics also earned him the appointment as supervisor both for the construction of the Pavia-Milan canal and for the construction of the embankment to contain the Po River at Parpanese, in the Oltrepò Pavese.

After a short period of recuperation in Brescia, he returned to the monastery of San Vittore al Corso in Milan, where, on 8 February 1759, he had a second stroke and died.

Works

Other works by Rampinelli, said by contemporaries to be preserved in manuscript at the monastery of San Vittore in Milan, are now lost. Applicazione de' principi alla fisica pratica Trattato di trigonometria piana e sferica Istituzioni Fisiche con il metodo analitico Trattato di idrostatica (ad integrazione delle istituzioni fisiche)