Alessandro Figà Talamanca

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

Alessandro Figà Talamanca (born in Rome, 25 May 1938) is an Italian mathematician who 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 , 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.

Talamanca 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.