Cesare Burali-Forti


Cesare Burali-Forti was an Italian mathematician, after whom the Burali-Forti paradox is named. He was a prolific writer, with 200 publications.

Biography

Burali-Forti was born in Arezzo, and he obtained his degree from the University of Pisa in 1884. In 1886, after two years of middle-school service in Sicily, Burali-Forti won a competition to become professor of analytic and projective geometry at the military academy in Turin. He was an assistant of Giuseppe Peano in Turin from 1894 to 1896, during which time he discovered a theorem which Bertrand Russell later realised contradicted a previously proved result by Georg Cantor. The contradiction came to be known as the Burali-Forti paradox of Cantorian set theory. He died in Turin.

Family

He married Gemma Viviani on 29 October 1887 and they had a son named Umberto.

Books by C. Burali-Forti