Alessandro Figà Talamanca

Who is Alessandro Figà Talamanca?

Alessandro Figà Talamanca is one of the most important living Italian mathematicians: he 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 Carlo Pucci, a mathematician who spent most of his energy in improving the method of teaching maths in Italy, and the management of Italian Maths Departments. 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 - an institution that is supposed to find a way of improving the whole Italian University system.

He 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.