Giuseppe Battaglini

Giuseppe Battaglini (1826 to 1894) was an Italian mathematician born in Naples who worked chiefly in geometry. Essentially self-taught at school level, he trained at the Scuola di Ponti e Strade in Naples, and because of his political views he was kept from a university post until the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ended in 1860, when he became professor of higher geometry at the University of Naples. In 1863 he was one of the three founders of the Giornale di matematiche and edited it; the journal became the main outlet for papers on non-Euclidean geometry in Italy. His own first memoir on non-Euclidean geometry, on Lobachevsky's imaginary geometry, appeared in 1867, and he also translated Lobachevsky's Pangeometry and Bolyai's Appendix for the journal. At the University of Rome in the mid 1870s he taught Alfredo Capelli and Giovanni Frattini, who both went on to make original contributions to group theory.