Alberto Tognoli


Alberto Tognoli is an Italian mathematician, who works on algebraic geometry.
Tognoli received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Pisa. From 1970 he was an ordinary professor at the Scuola Normale di Pisa, he also taught in Cosenza, Ferrara, Paris and Tours. He was also a professor of geometry at the University of Trento from 1986 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2005.
He is known for his research on Nash functions and Nash manifolds. He proved Nash's conjecture that smooth compact manifolds are diffeomorphic to non-singular real algebraic manifolds.
He received in 1974 the Caccioppoli Prize and in 1988 the Gold Medal in Mathematics of the Accademia dei XL.
Alberto Tognoli died in Rapallo Italy on 03 March 2008.
A funny anecdote: Once, at the end of a seminar, which had concluded in half the time available to him, a distinguished colleague, referring to the object of the conference whose author had not been mentioned, commented: "Very nice, Who did it? " Alberto, pointing himself with his thumb, answered naturally: "Me"
Selected publications