"Ricordo di Alessandro Padoa (1868-1937)"

Marco Borga, Giuseppina Fenaroli, Antonio C. Garibaldi IN MEMORY OF ALESSANDRO PADOA Abstract Alessandro Padoa was born on October 14, 1868, in Venice and died on October 25, 1937, in Genoa. He was a mathematician of the so-called Peano’s school and is well-known to logicians mainly for his investigations on the independence, understood as mutual undefinability, of primitive concepts of an axiomatic theory. In this framework he formulated in 1900 (at the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris) a technique, to be later known as “Padoa’s method”, to prove the independence of primitive concepts. In spite of his involvement in the world of research, the main job of Padoa was teaching mathematics in the secondary schools (and this is also the case for many other members of Peano’s school). In 1932, however, he got the university teaching degree (“libera docenza”) in mathematical logic and in the following years he delivered courses of mathematical logic at the University of Genoa. This paper aims to sketch a short biography of Padoa and to give a list of his publications (more than hundred items, mainly devoted to mathematical logic or to elementary mathematics). In a more general sense the paper deals with some historical data on mathematical logic in Italy in that period and could contribute to a deeper understanding of the role played by Peano’s school and of the reasons of its decline.