Guido Fubini
Guido Fubini (
January 19,
1879 -
June 6,
1943) was an
Italian mathematician, best known for
Fubini's theorem.
Born in
Venice, he was steered towards mathematics at an early age by his teachers and his father, who was himself a teacher of mathematics. In
1896 he entered the
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he studied under the notable mathematicians
Ulisse Dini and
Luigi Bianchi. He gained some early fame when his
1900 doctoral thesis, entitled
Clifford's parallelism in elliptic spaces, was discussed in a widely-read work on
differential geometry published by Bianchi in
1902.
After earning his doctorate, he took up a series of professorships. In
1901 he began teaching at the
University of Catania in
Sicily; shortly afterwards he moved to the
University of Genoa; and in
1908 he moved to the
Politecnico in
Turin and then the
University of Turin, where he would stay for some decades.
During this time his research focused primarily on topics in
mathematical analysis, especially
differential equations,
functional analysis, and
complex analysis; but he also studied the
calculus of variations,
group theory,
non-Euclidean geometry, and
projective geometry, among other topics. With the outbreak of
World War I, he shifted his work towards more applied topics, studying the accuracy of artillery fire; after the war, he continued in an applied direction, applying results from this work to problems in
electrical circuits and
acoustics.
In
1939, when Fubini at the age of 60 was nearing retirement,
Benito Mussolini's
Fascists adopted the
anti-Jewish policies advocated for several years by
Adolf Hitler's
Nazis. As a
Jew, Fubini feared for the safety of his family, and so accepted an invitation by
Princeton University to teach there; he died in
New York City four years later.
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