On the history of Levi-Civita’s parallel transport Giuseppe Iurato University of Palermo, Palermo, IT E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract In this historical note, we wish to highlight the crucial conceptual role played by the prin- ciple of virtual work of analytical mechanics, in working out the fundamental notion of parallel transport on a Riemannian manifold, which opened the way to the theory of con- nections and gauge theories. Moreover, after a detailed historical-technical reconstruction of the original Levi-Civita’s argument, a further historiographical deepening and a related critical discussion of the question, are pursued1,2,3. 1 Introduction The role of the principle of virtual works of analytical mechanics, in formulating Levi-Civita’s parallel transport of Riemannian geometry, has already been emphasized in [29], to which we refer for the first prolegomena to the question as well as for a wider and comprehensive historical contextualization of it. In this note, which falls into the intersection area among history of mechanics, history of differential geometry and history of theoretical physics, we would like to deepen this aspect regarding the genesis of one of the most important ideas of modern mathematics and its applications to theoretical physics (above all, field theory), enlarging the framework of investigation with the introduction and critical discussion of further, new historiographical elements of the question, after having reconstructed technically the original argument of Levi-Civita. In what follows, therefore, we briefly recall, as a minimal historical introduction, some crucial biographical moments of the Levi-Civita, which will help us to better lay out the question here treated.