Il carteggio Gianfrancesco Malfatti - Giordano Riccati

Gianfrancesco Malfatti (1731-1807), one of Vincenzo Riccati’s brightest students during his teaching years in Bologna, following his master’s death begun a significant scientific correspondence with Vincenzo’s younger brother Giordano (1709-1790), an eclectic scholar and author of a treatise on acoustics. The correspondence, which is published here in full, is kept in the Public Library Vincenzo Joppi of Udine, and cover a wide time span from October 1777 to May 1789, a few months before Giordano’s death. It consists of 125 letters, 61 by Malfatti and 64 by Riccati, the latters being copies made by Riccati himself. The topics discussed range from different areas of mathematics: logarithms of negative numbers, calculus of variations, probability and combinatorics, mathematical physics, in particular mechanics and acoustics.