Born in
Ancona, then part of the
Papal States, into a very poor
Jewish family: his father was Abramo Volterra and his mother, Angelica Almagià. Abramo Volterra died in 1862 when Vito was two years old. The family moved to
Turin, and then to
Florence, where he studied at the Dante Alighieri Technical School and the Galileo Galilei Technical Institute. [5]
Volterra showed early promise in
mathematics before attending the
University of Pisa, where he fell under the influence of
Enrico Betti, and where he became professor of rational mechanics in 1883. He immediately started work developing his theory of
functionals which led to his interest and later contributions in
integral and
integro-differential equations. His work is summarised in his book Theory of functionals and of Integral and Integro-Differential Equations (1930).
In 1892, he became professor of mechanics at the
University of Turin and then, in 1900, professor of mathematical physics at the
University of Rome La Sapienza. Volterra had grown up during the final stages of the
Risorgimento when the Papal States were finally annexed by
Italy and, like his mentor Betti, he was an enthusiastic patriot, being named by the king
Victor Emmanuel III as a
senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1905. In the same year, he began to develop the theory of
dislocations in
crystals that was later to become important in the understanding of the behaviour of
ductile materials. On the outbreak of
World War I, already well into his 50s, he joined the
Italian Army and worked on the development of
airships under
Giulio Douhet. He originated the idea of using inert
helium rather than flammable
hydrogen and made use of his leadership abilities in organising its manufacture. [citation needed]
After World War I, Volterra turned his attention to the application of his mathematical ideas to biology, principally reiterating and developing the work of
Pierre François Verhulst. An outcome of this period is the
Lotka–Volterra equations.
In 1922, he joined the opposition to the
Fascist regime of
Benito Mussolini and in 1931 he was one of only 12 out of 1,250 professors who refused to take a mandatory oath of loyalty. His political philosophy can be seen from a postcard he sent in the 1930s, on which he wrote what can be seen as an epitaph for Mussolini's Italy: Empires die, but Euclid’s theorems keep their youth forever. However, Volterra was no radical firebrand; he might have been equally appalled if the leftist opposition to Mussolini had come to power, since he was a lifelong royalist and nationalist. As a result of his refusal to sign the oath of allegiance to the fascist government he was compelled to resign his university post and his membership of scientific academies, and, during the following years, he lived largely abroad, returning to
Rome just before his death.
He died in
Rome on 11 October 1940. He is buried in the
Ariccia Cemetery. The Academy organised his funeral.
Family
In 1900 he married Virginia Almagia, a cousin.[13] Their son
Edoardo Volterra (1904–1984) was a famous historian of Roman law.[14]
Volterra also had a daughter, Luisa Volterra, who married
Umberto d'Ancona. D'Ancona piqued his father-in-law's interest in biomathematics when he showed Vito a set of data regarding populations of different species of fish in the Adriatic Sea, where decreased fishing activity from the war had led to an increase in the populations of predatory fish species. Vito published an analysis of the dynamics of interacting species of fish the next year.
^Borsellino, A.[in Italian] (1980). "Vito Volterra and Contemporary Mathematical Biology". In Barigozzi, Claudio (ed.). Vito Volterra Symposium on Mathematical Models in Biology. New York: Springer. pp. 410–417.
ISBN0-387-10279-5.
^According to
Accardi (1992, p. 150). Precisely, Accardi's analysis of the contribution of Volterra to the founding of functional analysis is aimed to show that he was the sole founder of the field, and to stimulate the readers to read Volterra's original papers.
Gemelli, Agostino (1942),
"La relazione del presidente" [The president's relation] (PDF), Acta Pontificia Academia Scientarum, 6: XI–XXIV. The commemorative address pronounced by Agostino Gemelli on the occasion of the first seance of the fourth academic year of Pontificial Academy of Sciences: it includes his commemoration of various deceased members.
Pancaldi, Giuliano (1993), "Vito volterra: Cosmopolitan Ideals and Nationality in the Italian Scientific Community between the Belle époque and the First World War", Minerva, 31 (1): 21–37,
doi:
10.1007/BF01096170,
ISSN0026-4695,
S2CID144918235.
Israel, G. (1988). "On the contribution of Volterra and Lotka to the development of modern biomathematics". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 10 (1): 37–49.
PMID3045853.