Antonio Collalto

Antonio Collalto was an Italian mathematician and physicist, born in Venice in April 1765 and died in Padua on 16 July 1820. He came from a modest family, and the biographer Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna thought his surname pointed not to the noble house of Collalto but to a Jewish convert to Catholicism in his youth. His scientific education owed much to the physicist Vincenzo Miotti. In 1795 he took a post teaching mathematics and physics in the public schools of Venice, and in 1806 he became professor of introductory sublime calculus and geodesy at the University of Padua. He lost that post in 1814 when Austria regained control, because of his reputation as a Jacobin. His books include a 1802 work identifying differential calculus with the calculus of series by way of Lagrange's theory of functions, and texts on analytic geometry from 1806 and 1809.