Italophilia priest and mathematician, born in 1598, is known for his work on indivisibles, a precursor of infinitesimal calculus, and for Cavalieri's principle in geometry, which partially anticipated integral calculus. Alessandro Volta, born in Como in 1745, invented the first true electrical battery, known as the voltaic pile. It provided a continuous source of electric current, which greatly benefitted Ampere, Ohm and other electrical experimenters in their development of basic electrical theory. A unit of electricity (volt) is named in his honor. Italians such as Fallopio, Eustachi, Malpighi, Morgagni and Valsalva were important pioneers of modern anatomy at the University of
Alessandro Vespignani Alessandro Vespignani Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the spread of disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the Internet. He is currently the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Network Science Institute. Vespignani is serving in the board/leadership of a variety of professional associations, institutions and journals. Vespignani is author, together with Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, of the book "Evolution