| Evangelista Torricelli |
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Information About ™Evangelista Torricelli |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT EVANGELISTA TORRICELLI | |
| 1608 births | |
| torricelli, evangelista | |
| 1647 deaths | |
| people from emilia-romagna | |
| 17th century mathematicians | |
| italian mathematicians | |
| italian inventors | |
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Evangelista Torricelli ( October 15 , 1608 - October 25 , 1647 ) was an Italian Physicist and Mathematician . Born in Rome , Torricelli soon moved to Faenza , then part of the Papal States . He was left fatherless at an early age. He was educated under the care of his uncle, a Camaldolese monk, who in 1627 sent him to Rome to study science under the Benedictine Benedetto Castelli ( 1577 - 1644 ), professor of Mathematics at the Collegio Della Sapienza in Pisa . Torricelli died a few days after having contracted Typhoid Fever . The Asteroid (7437) Torricelli was named in his honor. TORRICELLI'S WORK IN PHYSICS After Galileo's death Torricelli was nominated grand-ducal mathematician and professor of mathematics in the Florentine Academy . The discovery of the principle of the Barometer which has perpetuated his fame ("Torricellian tube", "Torricellian vacuum") was made in 1643 . The Torr , a unit of Pressure is named after him, as well as a non-SI unit for pressure 'Torr' (=mmHg) TORRICELLI'S WORK IN MATHEMATICS Torricelli is also famous for the discovery of an infinitely long solid now called '' Gabriel's Horn '', whose surface area is Infinite , but whose volume is finite. This was seen as an "incredible" paradox by many at the time (including Torricelli himself, who tried several alternative proofs), and prompted a fierce controversy about the nature of infinity, involving the philosopher Hobbes . It is supposed by some to have led to the idea of a "completed infinity". Torricelli was also a pioneer in the area of infinite series. In his ''De dimensione parabolae'' of 1644, Toricelli considered a decreasing sequence of positive terms and showed the corresponding Telescoping Series necessarily converges to , where ''L'' is the limit of the sequence, and in this way gives a proof of the formula for the sum of a geometric series. SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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