Giuseppe Peano gave a lecture that slowly turned Latin into his own language
On 3 January 1908, the mathematician Giuseppe Peano began addressing the Turin Academy of Sciences in Latin. With each grammar simplification he described, he dropped that feature from his own speech, so by the end he was speaking Latino sine flexione, his invented international language. The same man had given mathematics its axioms for counting.
Peano grew up on a farm near Cuneo in Piedmont, entered the University of Turin in 1876 and graduated with high honours in 1880. Within two years he was teaching the calculus course for his ailing professor, Angelo Genocchi, and his first major textbook, published in 1884, was actually credited to Genocchi. His early book on logic introduced the symbols now used everywhere for the union and intersection of sets.
In 1889 he published the axioms that still define the natural numbers, putting mathematical induction on a rigorous footing. A year later came the Peano curve, the first known space-filling curve, which showed that a line segment and a square contain equally many points; it is now seen as an early fractal. In 1891 he launched the Formulario project, an attempt to state every known formula and theorem in a single notation of his own design. He was so irritated by printing delays over his insistence on one-line formulas that he bought his own press. The final edition, in 1908, held 4,200 results but drew little notice because much of it was dated.
His zeal had costs. At the 1900 Paris philosophy congress he gave Bertrand Russell a copy of Formulario, and Russell retreated to the countryside to study every word Peano and his followers had written. Yet Peano became so intent on teaching his symbols that his calculus lectures suffered, and the Royal Military Academy dismissed him, though Turin kept him.
Latino sine flexione, announced in 1903, kept Latin vocabulary because so many people knew it while stripping out irregular grammar. The Academia pro Interlingua elected him director in 1908 and dropped its earlier language in favour of his. Much of his later writing appeared in it. Peano, author of more than 200 books and papers, taught at Turin until the day before his fatal heart attack in 1932.
Source: Giuseppe Peano
