Tullio Levi-Civita (1873–1941) was an Italian mathematician, born in Padua to a Jewish family. He studied at the University of Padua under Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, with whom he later developed the tensor calculus, or absolute differential calculus, that became the essential mathematical language of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Their joint 1900 paper, Méthodes de calcul différentiel absolu et leurs applications, laid foundations Einstein himself acknowledged as indispensable. Levi-Civita held the chair of rational mechanics at Padua and later a professorship at the University of Rome. He is independently credited with introducing the concept of parallel transport in differential geometry, a cornerstone of modern Riemannian geometry, and he corresponded extensively with Einstein and contributed to celestial mechanics, hydrodynamics, and the three-body problem. In 1938, under Italy's Fascist racial laws, he was stripped of his academic positions and expelled from all scientific societies because of his Jewish heritage. He died in Rome in 1941, isolated from the institutions he had helped define. His legacy endures in the Levi-Civita connection, the Levi-Civita symbol, and the Levi-Civita field, all standard tools in modern physics and mathematics.
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