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Vincenzo VivianiVinceno Viviani (April 5, 1622 - September 22, 1703) was a pupil of Torricelli and a disciple of Galileo. Viviani was born and raised in Florence, Italy. He studied at a Jesuit school. Once his intellectual gifts was noticed, Grand Duke Ferdinando de'Medici provided a scholarship for Viviani to purchase mathematical books. He became a pupil of Evangelista Torricelli and worked on physics and geometry. In 1639, at the age of 17, he was an assistant of Galileo in Arcetri. He remained a disciple until Galileo's death in 1642. From 1655 to 1656, Viviani edited the first edition of Galileo's collected works. When Torricelli died in 1647, Viviani was appointed to fill his lectureship at the Accademia dell' Arte del Disegno in Florence. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II also appointed him engineer with the Uffiziali dei Fiumi, a position Viviani held for the rest of his life. Viviani was also one of the first members of the Grand Duke's experimental academy, the Accademia del Cimento, when it was created a decade later. In 1660, Viviani and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli measured the velocity of sound by timing the difference between the flash and the sound of a cannon. They obtained the value of 350 meters per second, considerably better than the previous value of 478 meters per second obtained by Pierre Gassendi. The currently accepted value is 331.29 meters per second at 0°C. In 1666, Viviani's reputation as a mathematician was high throughout Europe, and he began to receive many job offers. That same year, Louis XIV of France offered him a position at the Acadmie Royale and John II Casimir of Poland offered Viviani a post as his astronomer. Fearful of losing Viviani, the Grand Duke appointed him court mathematician. Viviani accepted this post and turned down his other offers. In 1687, he published a book on engineering, Discorso intorno al difendersi da' riempimenti e dalle corrosione de' fiumi. Upon his death, Viviani left an almost completed work on the resistance of solids, which was subsequently completed and published by Luigi Guido Grandi. In the 1730s, the Church finally allowed Galileo to be reburied in a grave with an elaborate monument. The monument that was created in the church of Santa Croce was constructed with the help of funds left by Viviani for that specific purpose. Viviani's own remains were moved to Galileo's new grave as well. The lunar crater Viviani is named after him. External links
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