Photo: Family property

He was born in Gemona del Friuli on October 16th, 1925. His ancestral origin seems to have been further north, in Pradielis, in a valley where a proto-Slavic tribe had taken refuge in 700 AD., fleeing the Lombards; from there, in the late 1600s, an ancestor may have descended in search of work in Gemona.

 

 

In Pisa, Gianfranco Capriz had been the first to graduate with Alessandro Faedo, after a year of internment, during World War II, at Camp Antonie, Bitterfeld, a lager supporting IG Farben plants. Decades later, his wife Barbara, an Englishwoman, recalled how in his sleep he always resumed the fetal position suitable for the planks he met in the lager.

 

 

In 1966 he became full professor of Rational Mechanics in the University of Pisa, after working at the English Electric Company. He was president of the Italian Association of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics, and vice-president of the Italian Mathematical Union.

 

 

In Pisa he had a dual role. As director of CNR Institutes (1963-1983), first of IEI (Institute for the Elaboration of Information), then of CNUCE, he promoted the development of computer science in Italy, later also as president of the Finsiel Group company Tecsiel. As director of CNUCE, in February 1980 he opened the talks with Bob Kohn that would lead Pisa, and thus Italy, to have on April 30th, 1986 the first connection with the American ARPANET network, the progenitor of the Internet, with the work of Luciano Lenzini and Stefano Trumpy.

 

 

As a scholar in mathematical physics, he worked on continuum mechanics establishing a close relationship between the Italian school and the American school of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III, who, beginning in the 1960s, did intensive work on foundational analyses and developments of continuum mechanics. He was himself part of that school: he proposed theories and methods for dealing with the study of the behavior of complex bodies, those with active microstructure hardly described in the standard format, bodies among which we find those exotic materials now so much in use in advanced technology.

 

 

I met him during my doctorate. It took me three years to begin to understand how profound was what he insisted on analyzing. Yet I had already studied his articles.

 

 

He carried out active theoretical research until May 2021. As a scientist he was of unusual creativity; he was an inexhaustible storyteller, an educated man who saw no clear distinction between scientific and humanistic culture, a (direct and indirect) master of many; as far as I am concerned, also an honest and loyal friend, of the kind one rarely meets.

 

 

Paolo Maria Mariano