Tullio Levi-Civita (29 March 1873 — 29 December 1941); was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity.He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus
In 1900 he and Ricci-Curbastro published the theory of tensors which Albert Einstein used as a resource to master the tensor calculus, a critical tool in Einstein's development of the theory of general relativity. Levi-Civita's series of papers were also discussed in his 1915–1917 correspondence with Einstein. The correspondence was initiated by Levi-Civita, as he found mathematical errors in Einstein's use of tensor calculus to explain theory of relativity. It's evident from these letters that, after numerous letters, the two men had grown to respect each other. In one of the letters, regarding Levi-Civita's new work,
Einstein wrote:
"I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot".
C Cattani and M De Maria, Geniality and rigor: the Einstein – Levi-Civita correspondence (1915–1917), Riv. Stor. Sci. (2) 4 (1) (1996), 1–22; as cited in MacTutor archive..
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