Alessandro Figà Talamanca

Alessandro Figà Talamanca
Alessandro Figà Talamanca in 1968
Nationality	Italian
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of California

Alessandro Figà Talamanca (born in Rome, 25 May 1938) is one of the most important living Italian mathematicians: he has been given several prestigious tasks, both in Italy and abroad. Several times, he took part in managing the Italian University system, and shared his opinions in newspapers, such as La Repubblica. He was a close friend of Carlo Pucci, a mathematician who spent most of his energy in improving the method of teaching maths in Italy, and the management of Italian Maths Departments. (Pucci was, especially, the re-founder of the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica Francesco Severi.) From 1995 to 2003, Talamanca, successor to Pucci, was President of the Istituto, and he continued what Pucci had set up. He was also Vice-President of the European Mathematical Society.

Moreover, he was a member of the Consiglio Universitario Nazionale and, from 1999 to 2004, of the Comitato nazionale per la valutazione del sistema universitario - an institution that is supposed to find a way of improving the whole Italian University system.

He did research, and got valuable results, in the field of harmonic analysis, on aleatory Fourier series and the diffusion process, mostly in Rome - at La Sapienza -, but also in the US, especially in the Sixties. During that period he joined research activities in California, UCLA, where he got his Ph.D, in 1964, and, in the same year, was Acting Assistant Professor, and met the well-famous French-American mathematician Serge Lang, and also in Boston, Moore Instructor at MIT from 1966 to 1968.

While teaching at MIT, he read Tom M. Apostol's Calculus, a two volume book, and decided to bring it back to Italy - when he was to become Professor at the University of Genova - with him: he was the one who proposed an Italian edition of Apostol's work to a printer in Turin, and he himself overwatched the translation, in 1977. Talamanca has written a Calculus book himself, but, when given the first English-language Calculus class in the history of the faculty of Engineering of the Third University of Rome, he decided to make use of Lang's one. However, he has always preferred American books to Russian ones, such as Boris Demidovich's: he enjoys more the American friend-way of teaching Maths rather than the strong Soviet severity - as an example, in class he stated that, since now we have calculators, there's no use in learning the whole list of integrals that Demidovich reports.

He was Lecturer at Berkeley, from 1968 to 1969, then at Yale, from 1969 to 1970, then Visiting Professor in Maryland, in Washington, Wales and Sydney.

He taught Calculus for 50 years, including both Italian and American universities. Mostly, he referred to La Sapienza: in 2007, he became General Director of the Maths' Department there, but he was to leave in 2009 because he was 71. That's why he decided to accept to move to the Third University, where, in recognition of his prestige, he was given Calculus in English, to teach to foreign students,

He is able to speak English, and Modern Greek: and managed to hold a whole lesson at Athens in Greek. He told how hard it was, since, talking about very old times, there was no Greek dictionary detailed enough to contain, for instance, the word "differential equations": so, he was compelled to ask a Greek colleague a few minutes before starting - it was Διαφορική εξίσωση [Diaforikì exisosi]. It is pretty curious that, in Rome, the last student he examined was Greek!

He is also very interested in Analytic philosophy. Talking about that, he stated that Russell was the start, then Gödel the end.

He has always been up against Eugene Garfield's Impact factor system in Science (see here: L'Impact Factor nella valutazione della ricerca e nello sviluppo dell’editoria scientifica.

Selected Publications

• with John Price: Applications of random Fourier series over compact groups to Fourier multipliers. Vol. 43. 1972. pp. 531–541. doi:10.2140/pjm.1972.43.531. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
• with Claudio Nebbia: Harmonic analysis and representation theory for groups acting on homogeneous trees. Cambridge University Press. 1991. ISBN 0-521-42444-5.
• Herz, Carl (1994). "Review: Harmonic analysis and representation theory for groups acting on homogeneous trees, by Alessandro Figà-Talamanca and Claudio Nebbia". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 31 (2): 271–274. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1994-00530-0.
• with Tim Steger: Harmonic analysis for anisotropic random walks on homogeneous trees. AMS. 1994. ISBN 0-8218-2594-1. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)

Here is the full list of publications: Pubblicazioni (the titles are in English)