Enrico Betti

Enrico Betti was an Italian mathematician now remembered mostly for his 1871 paper on topology that led to the later naming after him of the Betti numbers. Born in Pistoia in 1823, he graduated from the University of Pisa in 1846, held an appointment there from 1857, and toured Europe in 1858 with Francesco Brioschi and Felice Casorati, meeting Bernhard Riemann. He worked on the theory of equations, giving early expositions of Galois theory, and discovered Betti's theorem, a result in the theory of elasticity. He was also closely involved in the politics of the new Italian state.