Roberto Conti

Roberto Conti (23 April 1923 – 30 August 2006) was an Italian mathematician, who contributed to the theory of ordinary differential equations and the development of the comparison method.

Biography Roberto Conti was born in Florence on 29 April 1923. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, under the supervision, respectively, of Leonida Tonelli (replaced, after his premature death, by Emilio Baiada) and Giovanni Sansone. Conti’s M.Sc. and Ph.D. dissertations dealt with translation surfaces (possibly a topic suggested by Tonelli after knowing about some Russian works) and particular aspects of the Cauchy problem. Later he held the position of research assistant to the chair of Sansone at the University of Florence. Their collaboration was fruitful and resulted in numerous articles, as well as the book (Sansone & Conti 1964), originally published in Italian, which was translated into a number of languages and became one of the standard texts on the subject in the 1960s. In 1963-1964 he held a visiting professorship at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) in Baltimore, Maryland.

His research focused on several topics, which often overlapped in the time and contributed to motivate each other. A leading theme was constituted by functional analysis and its applications to the theory of ordinary differential equations, dynamical systems and control systems. a foreign honorary member of the Romanian Academy since 1997 and was also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Differential Equations since its inception in 1964 until his death in 2006.

Selected works

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