Nicola Fergola

Nicola Fergola was an Italian mathematician, born on 29 October 1753 and dead at Naples on 21 June 1824, and the founder of the synthetic school, whose teaching centred on pure geometry and the methods of classical mathematics. He studied in the Jesuit school and at the University of Naples from 1767 under Giuseppe Marzucco, was influenced by Nicola Antonio De Martino and by the philosopher Antonio Genovesi, and founded a private school in Naples in 1771 that attracted many of the country's brightest boys. He taught synthetic and analytic geometry, wrote the first Neapolitan works on applying integral calculus to physical problems, and published a two-volume commentary on Newton's Principia in 1792 and 1793. A pioneer of projective geometry, he was admired by Michel Chasles.