Ercole Bottani (1897–1978)
Ercole Bottani (1897–1978)
Ercole Bottani helped establish electronic computing at the Politecnico di Milano. His student Luigi Dadda taught Domenico Ferrari, who supervised my doctoral advisor, Dr. Jehan-François Pâris. That line of engineers and system builders is my academic ancestry.
Bottani was born in Volpago del Montello, in the province of Treviso, in 1897. After the First World War, he studied general electrical engineering at the Politecnico, graduating with top honors under Angelo Barbagelata. He later held the chair in electrical measurements.
Students remembered him as tall and eccentric. His reinforced boots had iron heels, and their clatter on the Politecnico's wooden floors announced his arrival before he entered the classroom.
After the Second World War, Bottani served as Commissioner for Electricity in Upper Italy, contributing to the reconstruction of the electrical industry. In 1955, he helped found the Centro Calcoli Numerici at the Politecnico, which served both university and industrial users. The following year, he established CESI, the Centro Elettrotecnico Sperimentale Italiano, as a national laboratory for electrical testing and experimentation. The Politecnico's historical account and interview with Vito Amoia describe this work.
He also chaired MM SpA, the company responsible for financing and building the Milan Metro, and later resigned following political conflicts.
Bottani collaborated with Dadda on teaching material and supported his work in computing. Together with Rector Gino Cassinis, he secured the university's backing for the acquisition of the CRC 102A. Dadda worked on the machine in California and brought it to Milan; Bottani helped provide the institutional support the project required.
Tracing this history as an academic genealogy requires some care. The Italian university system in which Bottani and Dadda worked differed from the American system of doctoral supervision. Its principal degree was the laurea: four or five years of study followed by a thesis and an oral examination before a faculty commission. It was a terminal degree, roughly comparable to an American master's degree. Fermi received a laurea at Pisa in 1922; Bottani and Dadda received the same kind of qualification at the Politecnico.
Italy introduced the dottorato di ricerca, a research doctorate comparable to the Ph.D., in 1980. Before that, an academic career typically proceeded from the laurea to an assistantship under a senior professor, the libera docenza qualification to teach independently, and competition for a professorial chair. Mentorship could continue for decades without taking the form of a doctoral advisor-student relationship.
The Bologna Process, begun in 1999, subsequently established the familiar three-cycle structure of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. For earlier generations, including Ferrari, whose 1963 Dottore in Ingegneria was a laurea-level degree, lineage must be understood through supervision, mentorship, and collaboration. Applying the conventions of the Mathematics Genealogy Project to that history is useful, but it cannot make the two systems identical.
I usually begin this account with Bottani, although it can be extended to his teacher Barbagelata. Barbagelata designed and tested electrical installations throughout Northern Italy and directed the Carlo Erba Institution for seventeen years. Their relationship places the later work in computing within a much longer tradition of electrical engineering.