Tullio Levi-Civita

Tullio Levi-Civita (1873 to 1941) was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on the absolute differential calculus, now called tensor calculus, and its use in the theory of relativity. Born into an Italian Jewish family in Padua, he was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, who invented tensor calculus, and in 1900 the two published the theory of tensors in their Methodes de calcul differentiel absolu, a text Albert Einstein used to master the subject. In 1917 Levi-Civita introduced parallel transport in Riemannian geometry. He also worked on celestial mechanics, notably the three-body problem, on analytic mechanics and on hydrodynamics, and held chairs at Padua and Rome. The 1938 Italian race laws stripped him of his professorship and his society memberships, and he died in Rome in 1941.