Vito Volterra was born at Ancona on 3 May 1860, the only child of Abramo Volterra and Angelica Almagià. When he was three months old the town was besieged by the Italian army and the infant had a narrow escape from death, his cradle being actually destroyed by a bomb which fell near it. When he was barely two years old his father died, leaving the mother, now almost penniless, to the care of her brother Alfonso Almagia, an employee of the Banca Nazionale, who took his sister into his house and was like a father to her child. They lived for some time in Terni, then in Turin, and after that in Florence, where Vito passed the greater part of his youth and came to regard himself as a Florentine. At the age of eleven he began to study Bertrand’s
Arithmetic
and Legendre’s
Geometry
, and from this time on his inclination to mathematics and physics became very pronounced. At thirteen, after reading Jules Verne’s scientific novel
Around the Moon
, he tried to solve the problem of determining the trajectory of a projectile in the combined gravitational field of the earth and moon: this is essentially the ‘restricted Problem of Three Bodies’, and has been the subject of extensive memoirs by eminent mathematicians both before and after the youthful Volterra’s effort: his method was to partition the time into short intervals, in each of which the force could be regarded as constant, so that the trajectory was obtained as a succession of small parabolic arcs. Forty years later, in 1912, he demonstrated this solution in a course of lectures given at the Sorbonne.
Lunar Libration Tables and Determination of Crater Coordinates