Ernesto Pascal

Ernesto Pascal was an Italian mathematician born in Naples on 7 February 1865, who died in Naples on 25 January 1940. His father Stefano Pascal came from a family originally from Tarascon in France, and his brother Carlo became a professor of Latin literature. He studied at the University of Naples and graduated in mathematics in 1887, having already published several papers. He spent the following year at Pisa and then a year at Göttingen, where he particularly benefited from the teaching of Felix Klein, and he returned to Italy in 1889 aged only 24. He is best known for a wide range of textbooks that he produced, and he is also remembered for work on elliptic functions based on the Jacobi theta function. He taught at Pavia and later at the University of Naples, where he reorganised the teaching of mathematics.