Pietro Mengoli

Pietro Mengoli
Pietro Mengoli
Born	1626 Bologna, Papal States
Died	7 June 1686(1686-06-07) (aged 59–60) Bologna, Papal States
Resting place	Santa Maria Maddalena, Bologna
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Bologna
Parent(s)	Simone Mengoli and Lucia Mengoli (née Uccelli)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics, geometry, logic
Institutions	University of Bologna
Academic advisors	Bonaventura Cavalieri
Ecclesiastical career
Religion	Christianity
Church	Catholic Church
Ordained	1660

Pietro Mengoli (1626, Bologna – June 7, 1686, Bologna) was an Italian mathematician and clergyman from Bologna, where he studied with Bonaventura Cavalieri at the University of Bologna, and succeeded him in 1647. He remained as professor there for the next 39 years of his life.

Mengoli was pivotal figure in the development of calculus.^[1] He established the divergence of the harmonic series nearly forty years before Jacob Bernoulli, to whom the discovery is generally attributed; he gave a development in series of logarithms thirteen years before Nicholas Mercator published his famous treatise Logarithmotechnia.^[2] Mengoli also gave a definition of the definite integral which is not substantially different from that given more than a century later by Augustin-Louis Cauchy.^[1]