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Carlo Rinaldini

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Carlo Rinaldini
Born(1615-12-30)December 30, 1615
Ancona
DiedJuly 18, 1698(1698-07-18) (aged 82)
Ancona
Academic work
Discipline
  • Mathematician
  • Military engineer
  • Philosopher
  • Metrologist

Carlo Rinaldini, or Renaldini (30 December 1615 – 18 July 1698)[1], was an Italian mathematician, military engineer, philosopher, and metrologist from Ancona.

Biography

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Born into an aristocratic family originally from Siena, Rinaldini studied at the University of Macerata and the University of Bologna. He was in the service of Pope Urban VIII and obtained the supervision of the fortresses of Ferrara, Bondeno, and Comacchio from Taddeo Barberini, the pope's nephew. He also tutored Barberini's children.[1]

Rinaldini was appointed rector at the University of Pisa, and subsequently a Professor of Mathematics there from 1649 to 1666. Rinaldini was a friend to Galileo and Borelli, who nicknamed him "Simplicio" for his fidelity to traditional Aristotelianism.[2]: 98  Rinaldini corresponded with Vincenzo Viviani[3] and with Leopoldo de' Medici.[4] The correspondence with Leopoldo de' Medici helped establish the experimental agenda for the Accademia del Cimento, which was founded in 1657.[4] Rinaldini was an active member of the Accademia.[5]

As part of the Accademia, he proposed an experiment on the diffusion of heat. When a metal ball was frozen in ice, thermometers below the ball had the highest temperature drop, while when a metal ball was heated, thermometers above the ball had the highest temperature rise.[2]: 166  This disproved the idea that heat and cold propagated in a spherically uniform way, which led physicist and meteorologist W. E. Knowles Middleton to credit Rinaldini with the discovery of convection in air.[6]

Rinaldini had numerous disagreements with his friends and with Francesco Redi and Evangelista Torricelli. Rinadini opposed the theory, advanced by Redi, that insects can be born from parent plant galls.[7][8] He thus anticipated the hypothesis that gall insects were born from eggs laid by individuals of the same species, promulgated by Malpighi.[9][10]

In 1667, Rinaldini left Tuscany to go to the University of Padua, where he held the chair of Philosophy and published Philosophia rationalis, atque identità naturalis. He tried in vain to return to Pisa. He then moved to Venice, where he became the teacher of Elena Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in the world to obtain a degree in philosophy in 1678.[11]

In 1694, Rinaldini was the first person to propose a thermometric scale that used the freezing and boiling points of water as fixed references and divided the scale into degrees.[12][13] Christiaan Huygens originally suggested using freezing and boiling points as standards in 1665,[14]: 45–46  but scientists were unsure whether those standards would hold across different latitudes.[15][13] Rinaldi argued that the ice and boiling temperatures are universal,[15] and his scale divided the temperature span into 12 degrees.[16][14]: 56  Rinaldi's degrees were calibrated by measuring known mixtures of boiling and freezing water, although that method was subsequently found to be unreliable.[13][14]: 57 

Selected works

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  • Opus algebricum (in Latin). Ancona: Marco Salvioni. 1644. OCLC 22092376.
  • Opus mathematicum (in Latin). Bologna: Evangelista Dozza. 1655. OCLC 165902337.
  • Ars analytica mathematum in tres partes distributa (in Latin). Padua: Petri Mariae Frambotti. 1665–1684. OCLC 504104857.
  • De resolutione atque compositione mathematica libri duo (in Latin). Padua: Pauli Frambotti. 1668. OCLC 780145030.
  • Geometra promotus (in Latin). Padua: Petri Mariae Frambotti. 1670. OCLC 4465457.
  • Philosophia rationalis, naturalis, atque moralis opus in quo praesertim physica vniuersa ex accursis naturalium effectuum observationibus deducta, & ubi rei natura patitur geometrice demonstrata exhibetur. Tomus primus (in Latin). Padua: Petri Mariae Frambotti. 1681. OCLC 955004293.
  • Ad artem quam ipse conscripsit mathematum analyticam paralipomena (in Latin). Padua: Petri Mariae Frambotti. 1682. OCLC 22691008.
  • Commercium epistolicum (in Latin). Padua: Petri Mariae Frambotti. 1682. OCLC 78287679.

References

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  1. ^ a b Giannini, Giulia (2016). "Carlo Rinaldini". Biographical Dictionary of Italians. Vol. 87. Rome: Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 5 August 2018.
  2. ^ a b Boschiero, Luciano (2007). Experiment and natural philosophy in seventeenth-century Tuscany: the history of the Accademia del Cimento. Dordrecht: Springer. ISBN 9781402062452.
  3. ^ Giannini, Giulia (2023). "Capturing, Modeling, Overseeing, and Making Credible: The Functions of Vision and Visual Material at the Accademia del Cimento". In Valleriani, M; Giannini, G; Giannetto, E (eds.). Scientific Visual Representations in History. Springer, Cham. p. 227. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-11317-8_7. ISBN 978-3-031-11316-1.
  4. ^ a b Giannini, G (2023). "Establishing an experimental agenda at the Accademia del Cimento: Carlo Rinaldini's book lists". Annals of Science. 80 (2): 112–142. doi:10.1080/00033790.2023.2168060. hdl:2434/951634. PMID 36680492.
  5. ^ Beretta, Marco (2000). "At the Source of Western Science: The Organization of Experimentalism at the Accademia Del Cimento (1657-1667)". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 54 (2): 131–51. doi:10.1098/rsnr.2000.0104. JSTOR 531963. PMID 11624506.
  6. ^ Middleton, W.E. Knowles (1971). The Experimenters: A Study of The Accademia del Cimento. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. p. 35. ISBN 0-8018-1250-X.
  7. ^ Parke, Emily C (2014). "Flies from meat and wasps from trees: Reevaluating Francesco Redi's spontaneous generation experiments". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 45: 34–42. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.12.005. PMID 24509515.
  8. ^ Onelli, Corinna (16 Feb 2017). "La retorica dell'esperimento: per una rilettura delle Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl'insetti (1668) di Francesco Redi". Italian Studies (in Italian). 72 (1). Taylor & Francis: 42–57. doi:10.1080/00751634.2017.1287254.
  9. ^ "Carlo Rinaldini". Francesco Redi scienziato e poeta alla corte dei Medici (in Italian). Archived from the original on 2006-05-12.
  10. ^ "Lo sviluppo delle ricerche sulle galle". Francesco Redi scienziato e poeta alla corte dei Medici (in Italian). Archived from the original on 2006-05-09.
  11. ^ Guernsey, Jane Howard (1999). The Lady Cornaro: Pride and Prodigy of Venice. College Avenue Press. p. 155. ISBN 9781883551445.
  12. ^ Benedict, Robert P (1984). Fundamentals of Temperature, Pressure, and Flow Measurements. Wiley. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-0-471-89383-7.
  13. ^ a b c Howarth, RJ (2024). "The Heat of the Earth". The Emergence of Geophysics: Journeys into the Twentieth Century. Vol. 60. London: Geological Society Memoirs. p. 300. doi:10.1144/M60-2022-32.
  14. ^ a b c Bolton, HC (1900). Evolution of the Thermometer (PDF). Easton, Pennsylvania: Chemical Publishing.
  15. ^ a b Grodzinsky, E; Sund Levander, M (2019). "History of the Thermometer". Understanding Fever and Body Temperature. pp. 23–35. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-21886-7_3. ISBN 978-3-030-21885-0. PMC 7120475.
  16. ^ Schlager, Neil (2000). Science and Its Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery. Vol. 4. Gale Group. p. 320. ISBN 978-0-787-63936-5.
  • Poggendorff, Johann Christian, ed. (1863). "Renaldini (Rinaldini), Carlo". Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch für Mathematik, Astronomie, Physik, Chemie und verwandte Wissenschaftsgebiete zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (in German). Vol. 2 (M-Z). Leipzig: J.A. Barth. p. 603.
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