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List of Italian scientists

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Notable scientists

Contents

Middle Ages

  • Mondino de Liuzzi (c. 1270–1326), physician and anatomist whose Anathomia corporis humani (MS. 1316; first printed in 1478) was the first modern work on anatomy
  • Guido da Vigevano (c. 1280–c. 1349), physician and inventor who became one of the first writers to include illustrations in a work on anatomy
  • Trotula (11th–12th centuries), physician who wrote several influential works on women's medicine; whose texts on gynecology and obstetrics were widely used for several hundred years in Europe
  • Rogerius (before 1140–c. 1195), surgeon who wrote a work on medicine entitled Practica Chirurgiae ("The Practice of Surgery") around 1180
  • Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio (1330–1388), doctor and clock-maker at Padua, son of Jacopo Dondi, builder of the Astrarium
  • Jacopo Dondi dell'Orologio (1293–1359), doctor and clock-maker at Padua, father of Giovanni
  • Leonardo Fibonacci (c. 1170–c. 1250), mathematician, eponym of the Fibonacci number sequence, considered to be the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages
  • Renaissance

  • Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (c. 1460–c. 1530), physician and anatomist who was the first to describe the heart valves
  • Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), naturalist, noted for his systematic and accurate observations of animals, plants and minerals
  • Gaspare Aselli (c. 1581–1625), physician who contributed to the knowledge of the circulation of body fluids by discovering the lacteal vessels
  • Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576), mathematician and physician; initiated the general theory of cubic and quartic equations; emphasized the need for both negative and complex numbers
  • Bartolomeo Eustachi (1500 or 1514–1574), anatomist, described many structures in the human body, including the Eustachian tube of the ear
  • Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), physician, philosopher and botanist, produced the first scientific classification of plants and animals by genera and species
  • Realdo Colombo (c. 1516–1559), one of the first anatomists in the Western world to describe pulmonary circulation
  • Costanzo Varolio (1543–1575), remembered for his studies on the anatomy of the brain, and his description of the pons that bears his name
  • Gasparo Tagliacozzi (1546–1599), plastic surgeon; considered a pioneer in the field; called the father of plastic surgery
  • Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553), physician and scholar; first to state the germ theory of infection; regarded as the founder of scientific epidemiology
  • Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), mathematician and founder of accounting; popularized the system of double bookkeeping for keeping financial records; often cited as the father of modern accounting
  • Lodovico Ferrari (1522–1565), mathematician, famous for having discovered the solution of the general quartic equation
  • Luca Ghini (1490–1556), physician and botanist, best known as the creator of the first recorded herbarium and founder of the world's first botanical garden
  • Aloysius Lilius (c. 1510–1576), astronomer and physician; principal author of the Gregorian Calendar (1582)
  • Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), anatomist and physician; important discoveries include the fallopian tubes, leading from uterus to ovaries
  • Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (1499–1557), mathematician who originated the science of ballistics
  • Giambattista della Porta (c. 1535–1615), scholar and polymath, known for his work Magia Naturalis (1558), which dealt with alchemy, magic, and natural philosophy
  • Hieronymus Fabricius (1537–1619), anatomist and surgeon, called the founder of modern embryology
  • Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), missionary to China, mathematician, linguist and published the first Chinese edition of Euclid's Elements
  • Giovanni Antonio Magini (1555–1617), astronomer, astrologer, cartographer and mathematician, known for his reduced size edition of Ptolemy's Geographiae (1596)
  • 17th century

  • Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671), astronomer, devised the system for the nomenclature of lunar features that is now the international standard
  • Sanctorius (1561–1636), physiologist and physician; laid the foundation for the study of metabolism
  • Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), physicist and astronomer; founder of modern science; accurately described the heliocentric solar system
  • Gjuro Baglivi (1668–1707), physician and scientist; published the first clinical description of pulmonary edema;nd made classic observations on the histology and physiology of muscle
  • Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679), physiologist and physicist who was the first to explain muscular movement and other body functions according to the laws of statics and dynamics
  • Giuseppe Campani (1635–1715), optician and astronomer who invented a lens-grinding lathe
  • Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712), mathematician, astronomer, engineer and astrologer who was the first to observe four of Saturn's moons
  • Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), mathematician, invented the method of indivisibles (1635) that foreshadowed integral calculus
  • Giacinto Cestoni (1637–1718), naturalist, studied fleas and algae, and showed that scabies is provoked by Sarcoptes scabiei (1689)
  • Giovanni Battista Hodierna (1597–1660), astronomer, one of the first to create a catalog of celestial objects with a telescope
  • Niccolò Zucchi (1586–1670), astronomer and physicis; may have been the first to observe belts on the planet Jupiter with a telescope (on 17 May 1630), also claimed to have explored the idea of a reflecting telescope in 1616, predating Galileo Galilei and Giovanni Francesco Sagredo's discussions of the same idea a few years later
  • Giovanni Battista Zupi (c. 1590–1650), astronomer and mathematician; discovered that the planet Mercury had orbital phases
  • Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), physician and naturalist who made numerous experiments in entomology and human organology, and combated the doctrine of spontaneous generation
  • Antonio Maria Valsalva (1666–1723), professor of anatomy at Bologna; described several anatomical features of the ear in his book De aure humana tractatus (1704)
  • Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), physicist and mathematician, inventor of the barometer (1643)
  • Tito Livio Burattini (1617–1681), mathematician, in his book Misura Universale, published in 1675, first suggested the name meter as the name for a unit of length
  • Eustachio Divini (1610–1685), physician and astronomer; maker of clocks and lenses (1646), innovative compound microscope (1648)
  • Gjuro Baglivi (1668–1707), physician and scientist; published the first clinical description of pulmonary edema and made classic observations on the histology and physiology of muscle
  • Francesco Stelluti (1577–1652), polymath who worked in the fields of mathematics, microscopy, literature and astronomy; in 1625 he published the first accounts of microscopic observation
  • Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), physician and biologist; regarded as the founder of microscopic anatomy and may be regarded as the first histologist
  • Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618–1663), physicist and mathematician; noted for his discoveries in the field of optics; first to describe the diffraction of light
  • Geminiano Montanari (1633–1687), astronomer; known for his discovery of the variability of the star Algol (c. 1667)
  • Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654–1720), clinician and anatomist who is considered the first modern hygienist
  • Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), physician, considered a founder of occupational medicine
  • Francesco Redi (1626–1697), physician who demonstrated that the presence of maggots in putrefying meat does not result from spontaneous generation but from eggs laid on the meat by flies
  • 18th century

  • Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (1667–1733), philosopher and mathematician who did early work on non-Euclidean geometry, although he didn't see it as such
  • Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799), linguist, mathematician and philosopher, considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics
  • Laura Bassi (1711–1778), scientist who was the first woman to become a physics professor at a European university
  • Giuseppe Toaldo (1719–1797), physicist, gave special attention to the study of atmospheric electricity and to the means of protecting buildings against lightning
  • Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), biologist and physiologist, called the father of artificial insemination (done at Pavia in 1784)
  • Giovanni Arduino (1714–1795), father of Italian geology, who established bases for stratigraphic chronology by classifying the four main layers of the Earth's crust
  • Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), physician and physicist, noted for his discovery of animal electricity
  • Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), Italian-French who made major contributions to mathematics and physics
  • Jacopo Riccati (1676–1754), mathematician, known in connection with his problem, called Riccati's equation, published in the Acla eruditorum (1724)
  • Luigi Guido Grandi (1671–1742), philosopher, mathematician and engineer, known for studying the rose curve, a curve which has the shape of a petalled flower, and for Grandi's series
  • Tiberius Cavallo (1749–1809), physicist and natural philosopher who wrote on the early experiments with electricity; was known contemporaneously as the inventor of Cavallo's multiplier
  • Giuseppe Piazzi (1746–1826), mathematician and astronomer who discovered (1 January 1801) and named the first asteroid, or "minor planet", Ceres
  • Pellegrino Turri, built the first typewriter proven to have worked (1808); invented carbon paper (1806)
  • Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), electricity pioneer, eponym of the volt, inventor of the electric battery (1800)
  • Tommaso Campailla (1668–1740), physician, philosopher and poet, inventor of "vapour stovens" that he used to fight syphilis rheumatism
  • 19th century

  • Giovanni Battista Amici (1786–1863), astronomer and microscopist, inventor of the catadioptric microscope (presented at the Arts and Industry Exhibition in Milan in 1812)
  • Giulio Bizzozero (1846–1901), anatomist, known as the original discoverer of Helicobacter pylori (1893)
  • Leopoldo Marco Antonio Caldani (1725–1813), anatomist and physiologist; noted for his experimental studies on the function of the spinal cord
  • Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti (1853–1922), physicist, invented a tube filled with iron filings, called a "coherer" (1884)
  • Stanislao Cannizzaro (1826–1910), chemist, in 1858 put an end to confusion over values to be attributed to atomic weights, using Avogadro's hypothesis
  • Antonio Cardarelli (1831–1926), physician remembered for describing Cardarelli's sign
  • Vincenzo Cerulli (1859–1927), astronomer, the author of the idea that the canali are just a special kind of optical illusion
  • Ernesto Cesàro (1859–1906), mathematician; in 1880 he developed methods of finding the sum of divergent series; made important contributions to intrinsic geometry
  • Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759–1820), physician who introduced humanitarian reforms to the psychiatric hospital care of people with mental disorders
  • Francesco de Vico (1805–1848), astronomer, discovered a number of comets, including periodic comets 54P/de Vico-Swift-NEAT and 122P/de Vico
  • Ulisse Dini (1845–1918), mathematician and politician whose most important work was on the theory of functions of real variables
  • Giovanni Battista Donati (1826–1873), astronomer, one of the first to systematically adapt the new science of spectroscopy to astronomy
  • Angelo Dubini (1813–1902), physician who identified Ancylostoma duodenale (1838)
  • Girolamo Segato (1792–1836), egyptologist and anatomist, best known for his unique work in the petrifaction of human cadavers
  • Francesco Faà di Bruno (1825–1888), mathematician, known for the Faà di Bruno formula (1855, 1857)
  • Camillo Golgi (1843–1926), histologist noted for work on the structure of the nervous system and for his discovery of Golgi apparatus (1897)
  • Giovanni Battista Grassi (1854–1925), zoologist who discovered that mosquitoes were responsible for transmitting malaria between humans
  • Barnaba Oriani (1752–1832), astronomer, great scholar of orbital theories
  • Filippo Pacini (1812–1883), anatomist who isolated the Vibrio cholerae (1854), the bacteria that causes cholera
  • Antonio Pacinotti (1841–1912), physicist, inventor of the dynamo (1858) and electric motor (1858)
  • Ferdinando Palasciano (1815–1891), physician and politician, considered one of the forerunners of the foundation of the Red Cross
  • Luigi Palmieri (1807–1896), physicist and meteorologist, inventor of the mercury seismometer
  • Galileo Ferraris (1847–1897), physicist and electrical engineer, noted for the discovery of the rotating magnetic field, basic working principle of the induction motor
  • Macedonio Melloni (1798–1854), physicist, demonstrated that radiant heat has similar physical properties to those of light
  • Giuseppe Mercalli (1850–1914), volcanologist and seismologist, inventor of the Mercalli intensity scale (1902)
  • Quirico Filopanti (1812–1894), mathematician and politician; in his book Miranda! (1858), he was the first to propose universal time and worldwide standard time zones, 21 years before Sandford Fleming
  • Carlo Forlanini (1847–1918), physician, inventor of artificial pneumothorax (1882) for treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis
  • Giuseppe Zamboni (1776–1846), physicist who invented the Zamboni pile (1812); a model of dry battery
  • Francesco Zantedeschi (1797–1873), physicist who published papers (1829, 1830) on the production of electric currents in closed circuits by the approach and withdrawal of a magnet
  • Agostino Bassi (1773–1856), entomologist; first person to succeed in the experimental transmission of a contagious disease
  • Giacomo Bresadola (1847–1929), clergyman and a prolific and influential mycologist
  • Francesco Brioschi (1824–1897), mathematician, known for his contributions to the theory of algebraic equations and to the applications of mathematics to hydraulics
  • Francesco Carlini (1783–1862), astronomer; worked in the field of celestial mechanics; improved the theory of the motion of the Moon
  • Giovanni Caselli (1815–1891), physicist, inventor of the pantelegraph (1861)
  • Orso Mario Corbino (1876–1937), physicist and politician, discovered modulation calorimetry and Corbino effect, a variant of the Hall effect
  • Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti (1822–1876), anatomist, known for his discoveries on the anatomical structure of the ear
  • Domenico Cotugno (1736–1822), physician; discovered albuminuria (about a half century before Richard Bright); one of the first scientists to identify urea in human urine
  • Alessandro Cruto (1847–1908), inventor who improved on Thomas Alva Edison incandescent light bulb with carbon filament (1881)
  • Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771), anatomist, called the founder of pathologic anatomy
  • Angelo Mosso (1846–1910), physiologist who created the first crude neuroimaging technique
  • Adelchi Negri (1876–1912), pathologist and microbiologist who identified what later became known as Negri bodies (1903) in the brains of animals and humans infected with the rabies virus
  • Leopoldo Nobili (1784–1835), physicist, designed the first precision instrument for measuring electric current (1825)
  • Raffaele Piria (1814–1865), chemist, first to successfully synthesize salicylic acid (1839); the active ingredient in aspirin
  • Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana (1781–1864), astronomer and mathematician; founder of the Observatory of Turin
  • Emanuele Paternò (1847–1935), chemist, discoverer of the Paternò–Büchi reaction (1909)
  • Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), mathematician and a founder of symbolic logic whose interests centred on the foundations of mathematics and on the development of a formal logical language
  • Gaetano Perusini (1879–1915), physician, remembered for his contribution to the description of Alzheimer's
  • Arturo Issel (1842–1922), geologist, palaeontologist, malacologist and archaeologist; noted for first defining the Tyrrhenian Stage (1914)
  • Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), engineer, sociologist, economist, and philosopher, eponym of Pareto distribution, Pareto efficiency, Pareto index and Pareto principle
  • Paolo Ruffini (1765–1822), mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups
  • Antonio Scarpa (1752–1832), anatomist, famous for the anatomical eponyms Scarpa triangle and Scarpa ganglion of the ear
  • Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), astronomer and science historian who first observed lines on the surface of Mars, which he described as canals
  • Angelo Secchi (1818–1878), astronomer; known for his work in spectroscopy; pioneer in classifying stars by their spectra
  • Francesco Selmi (1817–1881), chemist, one of the founders of colloid chemistry
  • Enrico Sertoli (1842–1910), physiologist and histologist; discovered the cells of the seminiferous tubules of the testis that bear his name (1865)
  • Ascanio Sobrero (1812–1888), chemist, famous for having discovered the synthesis of nitroglycerine (1846)
  • Agostino Bassi (1773–1856), entomologist, first person to succeed in the experimental transmission of a contagious disease
  • Vincenzo Tiberio (1869–1915), physician and researcher; one of many scientists to notice the antibacterial power of some types of mold before Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin
  • Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (1853–1925), mathematician, inventor of tensor analysis collaborator with Tullio Levi-Civita
  • Augusto Righi (1850–1920), physicist who played an important role in the development of electromagnetism
  • Scipione Riva-Rocci (1863–1937), internist and pediatrician, inventor of the mercury sphygmomanometer
  • Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835), philosopher, economist and jurist, famous for having discovered the same link between electricity and magnetism
  • Giovanni Battista Venturi (1746–1822), physicist; discoverer and eponym of the Venturi effect
  • 20th century

  • Edoardo Amaldi (1908–1989), cosmic-ray physicist, one of the founding fathers of European space research, led the founding of the CERN, the ESRO and later the European Space Agency (ESA)
  • Silvano Arieti (1914–1981), psychiatrist and psychoanalyst long recognized as a leading authority on schizophrenia
  • Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974), psychiatrist and psychologist; founder of the healing system known as psychosynthesis
  • Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), psychiatrist, promoter of an important reform in the Italian mental health system, the "legge 180/78" (law number 180, year 1978)
  • Enrico Bombieri (born 1940), mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in number theory
  • Claudio Bordignon (born 1950), biologist, performed the first procedure of gene therapy using stem cells as gene vectors (1992)
  • Giuseppe Brotzu (1895–1976), physician, famous for having discovered the cephalosporin (1948)
  • Nicola Cabibbo (1935–2010), physicist who reconciled these strange-particle decays with the universality of weak interactions
  • Federico Capasso (born 1949), physicist, one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser (QCL) in 1994
  • Mario Capecchi (born 1937), molecular geneticist, famous for having contribution to development of "knockout mice" (1989)
  • Antonio Carini (1872–1950), physician and bacteriologist who discovered Pneumocystis carinii, which is responsible for recurrent pneumonia in patients with AIDS
  • Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (born 1922), population geneticist, currently teaching since 1970 as emeritus professor at Stanford University; one of the most important geneticists of the 20th century
  • Ugo Cerletti (1877–1963), neurologist, co-inventor with Lucio Bini, of the method of electroconvulsive therapy in psychiatry
  • Bruno de Finetti (1906–1985), probabilist, statistician and actuary, noted for the "operational subjective" conception of probability
  • Annibale de Gasparis (1819–1892), astronomer, his first asteroid discovery was 10 Hygiea in 1849; between 1850 and 1865, he discovered eight more asteroids
  • Ennio de Giorgi (1928–1996), mathematician; brilliantly resolved the 19th Hilbert problem; today, this contribution is known as the De Giorgi-Nash Theorem
  • Renato Dulbecco (born 1914), virologist, known for his brilliant work with two viruses that can transform animal cells into a cancer-like state in the test tube
  • Federigo Enriques (1871–1946), mathematician, known principally as the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry
  • Vittorio Erspamer (1909–1999), pharmacologist and chemist, famous for having discovered the serotonin (1935) and octopamine (1948)
  • Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), physicist, constructed the world's first nuclear reactor (1942), initiated the atomic age; father of atom bomb
  • Amarro Fiamberti, psychiatrist who first performed a transorbital lobotomy (by accessing the frontal lobe of the brain through the orbits) in 1937
  • Guido Fubini (1879–1943), mathematician, eponym of Fubini's theorem in measure theory
  • Agostino Gemelli (1878–1959), physician, psychologist, and priest, founder of a university and eponym of the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic
  • Riccardo Giacconi (born 1931), astrophysicist, called the father of X-ray astronomy
  • Clelia Giacobini (1931–2010), microbiologist, a pioneer of microbiology applied to conservation-restoration
  • Corrado Gini (1884–1965), statistician, demographer and sociologist, developer of Gini coefficient
  • Nicola Guarino (born 1954), scientist, co-inventor with Chris Welty, of the OntoClean, the first methodology for formal ontological analysis
  • Rita Levi-Montalcini (born 1909), neurologist, discovered the nerve growth factor (NGF)
  • Salvador Luria (1912–1991), microbiologist, shared a 1969 Nobel Prize for investigating the mechanism of viral infection in living cells
  • Ettore Majorana (1906–1938), theoretical physicist, noted for the eponymous Majorana equation
  • Massimo Marchiori, computer scientist who made major contributions to the development of the World Wide Web; creator of HyperSearch
  • Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), physicist, credited as the inventor of radio, often called the father of wireless communication and technology (1896)
  • Franco Modigliani (1918–2003), economist and educator who received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1985 for his work on household savings and the dynamics of financial markets
  • Maria Montessori (1870–1952), physician and educator; the innovative educational method that bears her name (1907) is now spread in 22,000 schools in at least 110 countries worldwide
  • Giulio Natta (1903–1979), chemist, famous for having discovered isotactic polypropylene (1954) and polymers (1957)
  • Giuseppe Occhialini (1907–1993), physicist, contributed to the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947, with César Lattes and Cecil Frank Powell
  • Pier Paolo Pandolfi (born 1963), geneticist, discovered the genes underlying acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL)
  • Giorgio Parisi (born 1948), theoretical physicist, called the father of the modern field of chaos theory
  • Bruno Rossi (1905–1993), experimental physicist, an authority on cosmic rays
  • Carlo Rovelli (born 1956), theoretical physicist and a founder of loop quantum gravity
  • Carlo Rubbia (born 1934), physicist who in 1984 shared with Simon van der Meer the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the massive, short-lived subatomic W particle and Z particle
  • Emilio Segrè (1905–1989), physicist, known for his discovery of the antiproton
  • Nazareno Strampelli (1866–1942), geneticist and agronomist, whose innovative scientific work in wheat breeding 30 years earlier than Borlaug laid the foundations for the Green Revolution
  • Carlo Urbani (1956–2003), physician, discovered severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 1998
  • Gabriele Veneziano (born 1942), theoretical physicist and a founder of string theory
  • Emilio Veratti (1872–1967), anatomist who described the sarcoplasmic reticulum
  • Vito Volterra (1860–1940), mathematician and physicist who strongly influenced the modern development of calculus
  • References

    List of Italian scientists Wikipedia


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