Ramiro Rampinelli

Ramiro Rampinelli (1697 to 8 February 1759), born Lodovico Rampinelli, was an Italian mathematician and physicist and a monk of the Olivetan Order. Born in Brescia into the noble Rampinelli family and educated by the Jesuits, he studied at the University of Bologna as a disciple of Gabriele Manfredi and took his monastic vows in 1722. He moved between the Olivetan houses of Venice, Padua, Rome and Milan, meeting professors such as Giovanni Poleni and Jacopo Riccati, and taught mathematics at Bologna from 1733. In 1740, at San Vittore al Corso in Milan, he became mathematics tutor to Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who thanked him in the preface to her Instituzioni analitiche. From 1747 he held the chair of mathematics and physics at the University of Pavia, and he also advised on river hydraulics, including the Pavia to Milan canal. He is counted among the best known Italian scholars of infinitesimal mathematics of the first half of the eighteenth century, and he wrote on optics, mathematical physics and hydrostatics.