Attilio Palatini
Attilio Palatini was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso.Biography
He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the University of Padua, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita.
He taught rational mechanics at the Universities of Messina, Parma and Pavia. He was mainly involved in absolute differential calculus and in general relativity. Within this latter subject he gave a sound generalization of the variational principle.
In 1919, Palatini wrote an important article where he proposed a new approach to the variational formulation of Einstein's gravitational field equations. In the same paper, Palatini also showed that the variations of Christoffel symbols constitute the coordinate components of a tensor.
He wrote the "Rational Mechanics" and "Theory of relativity" entries for the Hoepli Encyclopedia of Elementary mathematics.
