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
Volta Conference Volta Conference The Volta Conference was the name given to each of the international conferences held in Italy by the Royal Academy of Science in Rome, and funded by the Alessandro Volta Foundation. In the interwar period, they covered a number of topics in science and humanities, alternating between the two. The first conference, held at Lake Como in 1927, led to the public introduction of the uncertainty principle by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The second conference did not take place until 1932; its topic was "Europe", and it was notable for the participation of a number of mainly