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Ernesto Laura-main

Ernesto Laura

Biography of Ernesto Laura

Ernesto Laura was born in Porto Maurizio on March 23, 1879, where he completed his accounting studies before moving to Turin, where he graduated in Pure Mathematics in 1901. 

At the University of Turin, he began his academic career under the influence of Carlo Somigliana and especially Giacinto Morera, who wanted him as an assistant in Rational Mechanics and to whom he succeeded in teaching starting from 1909. 

In 1915, following a competition in Mathematical Physics, he occupied the chair at the University of Messina, but in 1916 he was called to military service as a third-category soldier. Appointed as an Engineering Officer, he was assigned to the Technical Direction of Aviation, where he remained until his discharge in January 1918.

He then resumed teaching at the University of Pavia, where he had already won a competition in 1916, and where he held the chair of Rational Mechanics. From 1922, he was an ordinary professor of the same subject at the University of Padua, which became his definitive seat. 

In 1946, he was called by the University of Trieste to evaluate candidates for the chairs of the newly established Faculty of Engineering. At the same university, in collaboration with Ugo Morin, also a professor at the University of Padua and appointed dean of the Trieste Faculty of Sciences, he contributed to the birth of the Mathematical Seminar, for which he became a lecturer in Mathematical Physics from 1946 until his death.

Suffering from circulatory problems for years, he passed away in Padua on December 29, 1949. 

Appreciated for his scientific merits, he was a member of the Messina Peloritana Academy, the Lombard Institute of Sciences and Letters, the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts, the Italian Astronomical Society, and the Paduan Academy of Letters, Sciences and Arts, of which he was also president in the last years of his life.

In the post-war period, the recognition of his ideals of freedom, democracy, and justice, which had led him to sign Benedetto Croce's Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in 1925, led him to be designated by the Alta Italia National Liberation Committee as the liquidator of the Padua branch of the Ministry of National Education and, in the two-year period 1945-1946, as extraordinary commissioner of the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts.

As a mathematician, Laura directed his studies toward the theory of elasticity, particularly on uncommon elasticity problems related to indefinitely extended elastic media. In his later scientific works, he dedicated himself to the equations governing the equilibrium of flexible and inextensible surfaces. He also showed interest in hydrodynamics (vortex theory), differential geometry, pure analysis, geodesy, and mechanics. During his service as an Engineering Officer in the military aviation, he was entrusted with studies on the problem of firing from aircraft.

Ernesto Laura was esteemed for his moral virtues and the goodness of his soul. Among his students and pupils, due to his understanding, welcoming, and indulgent attitude, he was known not as Prof. Laura, but as "Papà Laura".

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