Giovanni Giorgi was born in
Lucca on November 27, 1871.
Career
Giorgi studied
engineering at the Institute of Technology of Rome, he worked at Fornaci Giorgi in
Ferentino, then was the director of the Technology Office of Rome between 1905 and 1924. He also taught at the
University of Rome between 1913 and 1939. During
World War II he moved to
Ferentino. He was an Invited Speaker of the
ICM in 1924 in Toronto,[1] in 1928 in Bologna, and in 1932 in Zurich.
Personal life
He was engaged to
Laura Pisati, his former master's student who became the first woman invited to deliver a lecture at the fourth
International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), but she died in 1908 shortly before both her talk and their intended wedding.[2]
Toward the end of the 19th century, after
James Clerk Maxwell's discoveries, it was clear that electric measurements could not be explained in terms of the three base units of length, mass and time, and that some irrational coefficients appeared in the equations without any logical physical reason. In 1901, Giorgi proposed to the
Associazione elettrotecnica italiana [
it] (AEI) that the
MKS system (which used the
metre,
kilogram and
second as its base units) should be extended with a fourth unit to be chosen from the units of
electromagnetism, solving also the presence of the irrational coefficients.[4][5][6][7]
The Giorgi system was thus the precursor of the
International System of Units (SI) adopted in 1960, which was based on six base units: metre, kilogram, second, ampere,
kelvin, and
candela.[9] The
mole was added as a seventh base unit in 1971.[10]
^Giorgi, Giovanni. "On the functional dependence of physical variables". In: Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto, August 11–16. 1924. Vol. 2. pp. 31–56.
^Giovanni Giorgi (1934), "Memorandum on the M.K.S. System of Practical Units", Central Office of the International Electrotechnical Commission, 9, London: 1–6,
doi:10.1109/LMAG.2018.2859658
^Arthur E. Kennelly (1935), "Adoption of the Meter-Kilogram-Mass-Second (M.K.S.) Absolute System of Practical Units by the International Electrotechnical Commission (I.E.C.), Bruxelles, June, 1935", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 21 (10): 579–583,
Bibcode:
1935PNAS...21..579K,
doi:10.1073/pnas.21.10.579,
PMC1076662,
PMID16577693