Physicist and mathematician, born in Faenza, NEC Italy. He moved to Rome in 1627, where he devoted himself to mathematics, became Galileo's amanuensis (1641), and succeeded him as professor at the Florentine Academy. He discovered the effect of atmospheric pressure on water in a suction pump, and gave the first description of a barometer, or Torricellian tube (1643).
Evangelista Torricelli (October 15, 1608 – October 25, 1647) was an Italian physicist and mathematician, best known for his invention of the barometer.
Torricelli was born in Faenza, then part of the Papal States.
In 1632, shortly after the publication of Galileo's Dialogue concering the Two Chief World Systems, Toricelli wrote to Galileo of reading it "with the delight [...] of one who, having already practised all of geometry most diligently [...] and having studied Ptolemy and seen almost everything of Tycho [Brahe], Kepler and Longomontanus, finally, forced by the many congruences, came to adhere to Copernicus, and was a Galileian in profession and sect". (The Vatican condemned Galileo in June 1633, and this was the only known occasion on which Torricelli openly declared himself to hold the Copernican view.)
Aside from several letters, little is known of Toricelli's activities in the years between 1632 and 1641, when Castelli sent Torricelli's monograph of the path of projectiles to Galileo, then a prisoner in his villa at Arcetri. Although Galileo promptly invited Torricelli to visit, he did not accept until just three months before Galileo's death. After Galileo's death on January 8, 1642, Grand Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici asked him to succeed Galileo as the grand-ducal mathematician and professor of mathematics in the University of Pisa.
Torricelli died in Florence a few days after having contracted typhoid fever, and was buried in San Lorenzo.
Contributions to physics
Torricelli's chief invention was the barometer, which arose from solving an important practical problem.
Torricelli also discovered Torricelli's Law, regarding to the speed of a fluid flowing out of an opening, which was later shown to be a particular case of Bernoulli's principle.
Selected works
His manuscripts are preserved at Florence. The following have appeared in print:
Trattato del moto, Florence, before 1641 Opera geometrica, Florence, 1644 Lezioni accademichi, Florence, printed 1715 Esperienza dell argento vivo, reprint, Berlin, 1897
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