ABSTRACT
Vito Volterra was not just a mathematician who happened upon and developed some useful mathematical ideas. Rather, he was an individual with worldly interests and involvement. He was a precocious child and a man of conviction. As a youth, at the age of thirteen, he was working on ballistic problems. In fact, after reading Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon, he worked out the trajectory of a gun's projectile in the combined gravitational fields of the earth and the moon. In 1883, at the age of only 23, he was appointed Professor of Rational Mechanics at the University of Pisa where, nine years later, he was appointed Dean of the faculty of science. His reputation was growing mainly as a result of his work on functional analysis of which he was one of the initial investigators. This resulted in his transferring first to the University of Turin in 1893 and then to the chair of mathematical physics at the University of Rome in 1900. This was a year after he was made a fellow of the Academia del Lincei, the most prestigious Italian scientific academy at the time. It was at the University of Rome where Volterra did his original mathematical work in the biological and social sciences. He was concerned about Italian science policy and so he entered the political arena where, in 1905, he was made a life member of the Italian senate and also president of the Academia del Lincei. By 1913,
he had visited and lectured in most of Western Europe as well as North and South America and had met and made personal friends with many of the notable scientists and mathematicians of the time such as Borel, Poincaré, and Mittag-Leffler.
