Evangelista Torricelli (/ˌtɔːriˈtʃɛli/ TORR-ee-CHEL-ee,[2] also US: /ˌtɔːr-/ TOR-,

[3] Italian: [evandʒeˈlista torriˈtʃɛlli] (About this soundlisten); 15 October 1608

– 25 October 1647) was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of
Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for
his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles.

Evangelista Torricelli was born on 15 October 1608 in Rome, the firstborn child of
Gaspare Torricelli and Caterina Angetti.[4] His family was from Faenza in the
Province of Ravenna, then part of the Papal States. His father was a textile worker
and the family was very poor. Seeing his talents, his parents sent him to be
educated in Faenza, under the care of his uncle, Giacomo (Jacob), a Camaldolese
monk, who first ensured that his nephew was given a sound basic education. He then
entered young Torricelli into a Jesuit College in 1624, possibly the one in Faenza
itself, to study mathematics and philosophy until 1626, by which time his father,
Gaspare, had died. The uncle then sent Torricelli to Rome to study science under
the Benedictine monk Benedetto Castelli, professor of mathematics at the Collegio
della Sapienza (now known as the Sapienza University of Rome).[5][6] Castelli was a
student of Galileo Galilei.[7] "Benedetto Castelli made experiments on running
water (1628), and he was entrusted by Pope Urban VIII with hydraulic
undertakings."[8] There is no actual evidence that Torricelli was enrolled at the
university. It is almost certain that Torricelli was taught by Castelli. In
exchange he worked for him as his secretary from 1626 to 1632 in a private
arrangement.[9] Because of this, Torricelli was exposed to experiments funded by
Pope Urban VIII. While living in Rome, Torricelli became also the student of the
mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri, with whom he became great friends.[7] It was
in Rome that Torricelli also became friends with two other students of Castelli,
Raffaello Magiotti and Antonio Nardi. Galileo referred to Torricelli, Magiotti, and
Nardi affectionately as his "triumvirate" in Rome.[10]
Career
Torricelli's statue in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze

In 1632, shortly after the publication of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems, Torricelli wrote to Galileo of reading it "with the
delight ... of one who, having already practiced all of geometry most
diligently ... and having studied Ptolemy and seen almost everything of Tycho
Brahe, Kepler and Longomontanus, finally, forced by the many congruences, came to
adhere to Copernicus, and was a Galileian in profession and sect". (The Vatican
condemned Galileo in June 1633, and this was the only known occasion on which
Torricelli openly declared himself to hold the Copernican view.)

Aside from several letters, little is known of Torricelli's activities in the years
between 1632 and 1641, when Castelli sent Torricelli's monograph of the path of
projectiles to Galileo, then a prisoner in his villa at Arcetri. Although Galileo
promptly invited Torricelli to visit, Torricelli did not accept until just three
months before Galileo's death. The reason for this was that Torricelli's mother,
Caterina Angetti died.[7] "(T)his short intercourse with the great mathematician
enabled Torricelli to finish the fifth dialogue under the personal direction of its
author; it was published by Viviani, another pupil of Galileo, in 1674."[8] After
Galileo's death on 8 January 1642, Grand Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici asked
Torricelli to succeed Galileo as the grand-ducal mathematician and chair of
mathematics at the University of Pisa. Right before the appointment, Torricelli was
considering returning to Rome because of there being nothing left for him in
Florence,[7] where he had invented the barometer. In this new role he solved some
of the great mathematical problems of the day, such as finding a cycloid's area and
center of gravity. As a result of this study, he wrote the book the Opera
Geometrica in which he described his observations. The book was published in 1644.
[7]
Little was known about Torricelli in regard to his works in geometry when he
accepted the honorable position, but after he published Opera Geometrica two years
later, he became highly esteemed in that discipline.[11] "He was interested in
Optics, and invented a method whereby microscopic lenses might be made of glass
which could be easily melted in a lamp."[8] As a result, he designed and built a
number of telescopes and simple microscopes; several large lenses, engraved with
his name, are still preserved in Florence. On 11 June 1644, he famously wrote in a
letter to Michelangelo Ricci:

Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d'un pelago d'aria. (We live submerged at the
bottom of an ocean of air.)[12]

However his work on the cycloid involved him in a controversy with Gilles de
Roberval, who accused him of plagiarizing his earlier solution of the problem of
its quadrature. Although there seems no room for doubt that Torricelli's was
arrived at independently, the matter was still in dispute up to his death.[13]
Death
Evangelista Torricelli portrayed on
the frontpage of Lezioni d'Evangelista Torricelli
Torricelli's experiment
Torricelli lunar crater map

Torricelli died of fever, most likely typhoid,[4][14] in Florence on 25 October

1647,[15] 10 days after his 39th birthday, and was buried at the Basilica of San
Lorenzo. He left all his belongings to his adopted son Alessandro. "Belonging to
that first period are his pamphlets on Solidi spherali, Contatti and the major part
of the propositions and sundry problems which were gathered together by Viviani
after Torricelli's death. This early work owes much to the study of the
classics."[7] Sixty-eight years after Torricelli had died, his genius still filled
his contemporaries with admiration, as evidenced by the anagram below the
frontispice of Lezioni accademiche d'Evangelista Torricelli published in 1715: En
virescit Galileus alter, meaning "Here blossoms another Galileo."

In Faenza, a statue of Torricelli was created in 1868 in gratitude for all that
Torricelli had done in advancing science during his short lifetime.[8] The asteroid
7437 Torricelli and a crater on the Moon were named in his honor.