Laura Pisati (1869/1870[1] - 30 March 1908) was an Italian mathematician.[2][3] She was the first Italian to join the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung (DMV), in 1905, and in 1908 became the first woman invited to deliver a lecture at International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM).[4][5]
Pisati was born in Ancona, and worked as a teacher at a secondary school for girls in Rome beginning in 1897. She graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in 1905.[5] She died young a few days before the 1908 Congress in Rome,[6] and a few days before her intended wedding to Italian physicist and electrical engineer Giovanni Giorgi, who had mentored her as a master's student.[5] Her work for the Congress was titled "Saggio di una teoria sintetica delle funzioni di variabile complessa" ["An Essay on a Synthetic Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable"], and was presented by Roberto Marcolongo.[5][7][8]
Her geometry textbook Elementi di geometria ad uso delle scuole medie inferiori, published in 1907, was part of a movement in Italian teaching of the time reacting against a presentation of the material focusing on intuition and hands-on experimentation, as had become popular beginning in the 1880s, and returning to a style of teaching geometry that included more rigorous proofs. In her preface, Pisati wrote that it would be a mistake to omit formal proofs and that it is not any more difficult to include this material.[9]