Page 122 - Textos de Matemática Vol. 34

112 JAIME CARVALHO E SILVA
Figure 1. The cover of the 1952 edition of the celebrated work of Luciano Pereira da Silva
e Almeida, Francisco Gomes Teixeira, A. d’Arzilla Fonseca, Henrique de Figueiredo and Jos´e Bruno de Cabedo.
Manuel Pedro de Mello (1765-1833), a student of Jos´e Anast´acio da Cunha, was the first professor of hydraulics at the University of Coimbra; this discipline was carefully prepared because Manuel Pedro de Mello travelled to several European universities to study their work on this area. His (lost) work on the parallelogram of forces won a prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Copenhagen in 1806.
Rodrigo Ribeiro de Sousa Pinto (1811-1893) was noted for his astronomical work on the calculation of astronomical events. Four of his publications were re- viewed in the “Jahrbuch u¨ber die Fortschritte der Mathematik” between 1878 and 1890; two were reviewed in “Le r´epertoire bibliographique des sciences math´emati- ques” in 1855 and 1856.
Luciano Pereira da Silva (1864-1926) was a very high level researcher on the History of Mathematics and studied extensively the life and work of Pedro Nunes (1502-1578) the inventor of the loxodromic curve; from the multiple works he produced we can signal the one where he studied carefully the epic poem “Os Lus´ıadas” from Portugal’s greatest poet Lu´ıs de Cam˜oes, showing that the author had extensive scientific knowledge, namely in Astronomy.