Luca Valerio

Luca Valerio was an Italian mathematician, born in Naples in 1552 and brought up partly on the island of Corfu, who studied at the Collegio Romano in Rome under Christopher Clavius and took a doctorate in philosophy and theology. He taught rhetoric and Greek at the Collegio Greco, then rhetoric and philosophy and from about 1600 mathematics at the University of Sapienza in Rome, and he was for many years corrector of Greek at the Vatican library. His De centro gravitatis solidorum, written in 1603, applied methods of Archimedes to find volumes and centres of gravity of solid bodies, in particular solids of rotation and their segments, and it used early ideas about the quotient of limits. He met Galileo at Pisa in 1590 and corresponded with him from about twenty years later, and Galileo in 1638 praised him as the greatest geometer. He died in Rome on 17 January 1618.