Giacinto Morera

Giacinto Morera (1856 to 1909) was an Italian engineer and mathematician, born in Novara in the Kingdom of Sardinia and dying in Turin. The son of a wealthy businessman, he took an engineering degree in 1878 and a mathematics degree in 1879 at the University of Turin, then widened his training at Pavia, Pisa and Leipzig under teachers including Eugenio Beltrami, Enrico Betti and Felix Klein. He won the chair of rational mechanics at the University of Genoa, where he also taught mathematical physics and served as dean of the Faculty and as rector, and from 1900 he taught advanced and rational mechanics at the University and the Polytechnic of Turin. He is known for Morera's theorem in the theory of functions of a complex variable and for his work on linear elasticity, where the Morera stress functions carry his name. A MacTutor biography describes an effective teacher whose strength was analytical and critical, solving difficult problems within existing theories rather than founding new ones. His research touched dynamics, the Pfaff method for systems of partial differential equations, harmonic functions and the gravitational field of an ellipsoid. He belonged to the Academy of Sciences of Turin and the Accademia dei Lincei.