Pietro De Martino

Pietro De Martino, also written Di Martino, was a mathematician and astronomer from the Kingdom of Naples, born in Faicchio on 31 May 1707 and dead in Naples on 28 January 1746. He was the brother of Angelo, professor first of medical physics and then of mathematics at the University of Naples, and of Nicola Antonio De Martino, professor of mathematics and director of the Royal Engineers Corps and the Marine Guard. A pupil of Agostino Ariani and of Giacinto De Cristoforo, he was assigned the astronomical and nautical chair at the University of Naples in 1735. He disputed with Roger Joseph Boscovich the question whether a right result can be reached starting from a wrong hypothesis. He wrote various works, including an Italian edition of the plane geometry of Euclid, and his Nuove istituzioni di aritmetica pratica, first published in Naples in 1739, had many reprints, the better known being that of 1758.