Salvatore Pincherle, Hon.F.R.S.E.

by E T Whittaker

Salvatore Pincherle was born March 11, 1853, at Trieste, and graduated in 1874 at Pisa with an inaugural dissertation on Capillarity, which was published in the same year in Nuovo Cimento. In the following year he obtained an appointment as a teacher of mathematics in the Lyceum at Pavia, and made some advances in the theory of surfaces of minimum area, a subject evidently suggested by his interest in capillarity. From this he passed to Analysis, which was soon established as the chief interest of his scientific career.

In 1880 he. obtained a University Chair of Mathematics at Palermo, and in the following year was translated to the University of Bologna, where the rest of his long life was spent.

Pincherle's name is associated chiefly with the theory of Functional Operations. The treatise which he wrote in conjunction with Dr Ugo Amaldi in 1901, Le Operazioni Distributive e le loro Applicazioni all, Analisi, and the lengthy contribution to the Encyklopädie d. math. Wiss. in 1906 on "Funktionaloperationen und Gleichungen," are to a great extent connected accounts of his own discoveries, which had been published originally in the Mem. R. Accad. Bologna, the R.C. Ist. Lombardo, R. C. Accad. Lincei, R. C. Circ. Mat. Palermo, Ann. Mat. pura appl., Acta math. Stockh., Math. Ann., and other journals.

He was elected to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1901, and to Honorary Fellowship of our Society in 1921. He died July i i y 1936.

Salvatore Pincherle's RSE obituary by E T Whittaker appeared in Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh 57 (1936-37), 462.