Salvatore Pincherle

Salvatore Pincherle (1853-1936) was a student of Enrico Betti at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. After graduation he took Casorati’s advice and spent the academic year 1877-78 in Berlin, listening to lectures by Kronecker and Weierstrass. On his return to Italy, he published his lengthy Saggio1 in 1880, which gave the first presentation in Italy of Weierstrass’s theory of analytic functions, and could be seen as a Weierstrassian counterpart to Casorati’s Riemannian textbook2. In 1881, Pincherle obtained a chair at the University of Bologna, where he taught until his retirement in 1928. He quickly took the opportunity to write to Poincaré to set out his research agenda, and drew the interesting response out in Poincaré’s reply3.