Viviani

Vicenzo Viviani

Born: 5 April 1622 in Florence, Italy
Died: 22 Sept 1703 in Florence, Italy

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Viviani was a pupil of Torricelli and a disciple of Galileo and worked on physics and geometry. He determined the tangent to the cycloid but he was not the first to succeed in this.

In 1660, together with Borelli, Viviani measured the velocity of sound by timing the difference between the flash and the sound of a cannon. They obtained the value of 350 metres per second, which is considerably better than the previous value of 478 metres per second obtained by Gassendi (the currently accepted value is 331.29 metres per second at 0degrees C).

In 1692 Viviani proposed the following problem which aroused much interest. A hemisphere has 4 equal windows of such a size that the remaining surface can be exactly squared - how is this possible?

Other Web sites:

Rice University, USA
Clarke University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. A Fabroni, Vitae italorum doctrina excellentium I (Pisa, 1777), 307-344. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996