Math Guys in Rome

The Villa Borghese Gardens form a giant park in Rome, and at the western edge of it are the Pincian Gardens, so named because they’re at the top of the Pincian Hill.  (Belated note to self: the fact that they were on top of a hill means it should not have been any sort of surprise that there were many many steps to get up to the Gardens.)

These were [this was?] the first public park opened in the city, and around 1850 a bunch of busts of prominent Italians were commissioned for the park.  Some of these were kept in the park, some were moved and then moved again, and some were altered to represent Italians who seemed more worthy of being commemorated.   Then through the 1950s more busts were added and there are now a total of 228, of which 225 are of men and 3 are of women.

There’s a map of all the busts online [here, along with all the history], so it was pretty easy to search out mathematicians.  Here’s Archimedes:

This was one of the original busts, but back then it was of Niccolò Machiavell; it got re-formed into Archimedes around 1860. (You might be wondering, too, at Archimedes Italian background.    A few of these busts were a little more liberal than others on what it meant to be Italian.)

This next one is of Giordano Bruno, born in 1548:

Bruno was a big fan of Copernicus’s still-unpopular view that the earth revolves around the sun, though he also thought that the sun was nothing unique either — just one of an infinite number of heavenly bodies.  Poor Bruno didn’t get along too well with the church of the time, and was burned at the stake in 1600.

On a lighter note, here’s Leonardo da Vinci, along with a rose that someone left for him:

(I just noticed the square around his face.  What’s that about?  It’s in the few other pictures that we took of him, too.)

Next up is Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia, also known as Joseph-Louis Lagrange (though Wikipedia and Mactutor say his middle name was Lodovico originally).

He looks totally proud of everything named after him, like the Lagrangian and Lagrange Multipliers.

Here’s Pythagoras (another “Italian”) with two of his closest friends:

And finally, this is Niccolò Fontana, who became known as Tartaglia (stutterer) because the French invaded his hometown of Brescia when he was a teen and sliced his face. Ugh.

He translated Euclid into Italian and is also known for his role is finding a general solution to the cubic equation, which deserves a post all to itself someday.

And that’s it!  In theory Galileo should be in this group, but we couldn’t find him (we think he was hidden behind a construction fence), and so should Barnaba Tortolini (not sure why we missed him).  Oh, and there was also an obelisk and this really cool water clock, which was one of the main reasons that we went to this neck of the woods in the first place, but that will appear in the next post…