Eugenio Beltrami

Eugenio Beltrami was an Italian mathematician notable for his work concerning differential geometry and mathematical physics. His work was noted especially for clarity of exposition. He was the first to prove the consistency of non-Euclidean geometry by modelling it on a surface of constant curvature, the pseudosphere, and in the interior of an n-dimensional unit sphere, the so-called Beltrami–Klein model. He also developed singular value decomposition for matrices, which has been subsequently rediscovered several times. Beltrami's use of differential calculus for problems of mathematical physics indirectly influenced the development of tensor calculus by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita.