Gino Fano

Who was Gino Fano?

Gino Fano was an Italian mathematician. He was born in Mantua, Italy and died in Verona, Italy.

Fano worked on projective and algebraic geometry; the Fano postulate, Fano plane, Fano fibration, Fano surface, and Fano varieties are named for him. His work in the foundations of geometry predates the similar, but more popular, work of David Hilbert by about a decade.

Fano is considered the "Father of Finite Geometry". In his article on proving the independence of his set of axioms for projective n-space, he produced a finite three-dimensional space with 15 points, 35 lines and 15 planes, in which each line had only three points on it. The planes in this space consisted of seven points and seven lines and are now known as Fano planes:

Ugo Fano and Robert Fano were his sons.

In 1907 Gino Fano contributed two articles to Part III of Klein's encyclopedia. The first was a comparison of analytic geometry and synthetic geometry through their historic development in the 19th century. The second was on continuous groups in geometry and group theory as a unifying principle in geometry.