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Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (ɡreˈɡɔːrjo ˈrittʃi kurˈbastro; 12 January 1925) was an Italian mathematician. He is most famous as the discoverer of tensor calculus. With his former student Tullio Levi-Civita, he wrote his most famous single publication, a pioneering work on the calculus of tensors, signing it as Gregorio Ricci. This appears to be the only time that Ricci-Curbastro used the shortened form of his name in a publication, and continues to cause confusion. Ricci-Curbastro also published important works in other fields, including a book on higher algebra and infinitesimal analysis, and papers on the theory of real numbers, an area in which he extended the research begun by Richard Dedekind. Completing privately his high school studies at only 16 years of age, he enrolled on the course of philosophy-mathematics at Rome University (1869). The following year the Papal State fell and so Gregorio was called by his father to the city of his birth, Lugo di Romagna. Subsequently he attended courses at University of Bologna during the year 1872 - 1873, then transferred to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 1875 he graduated in Pisa in physical sciences and mathematics with a thesis on differential equations, entitled "On Fuches's Research Concerning Linear Differential Equations". During his various travels he was a student of the mathematicians Enrico Betti, Eugenio Beltrami, Ulisse Dini and Felix Klein. In 1877 Ricci-Curbastro obtained a scholarship at the Technical University of Munich, Bavaria, and he later worked as an assistant of Ulisse Dini, his teacher. In 1880 he became a lecturer of mathematics at the University of Padua where he dealt with Riemannian geometry and differential quadratic forms. He formed a research group in which Tullio Levi-Civita worked, with whom he wrote the fundamental treatise on absolute differential calculus (also known as Ricci calculus) with coordinates or tensor calculus on Riemannian manifold, which then became the lingua franca of the subsequent theory of Albert Einstein's general relativity.
