Giuseppe Peano, an Italian mathematician and logician, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Turin from 1890 to 1932 and also taught at the military academy in Turin from 1886 to 1901. In 1891 he founded the Rivista di matematica, which was later also published in French (Revue de mathématique) and in Interlingua (an international language developed from Latino sine flexione, an auxiliary language based on Latin), which Peano propounded in 1903. In 1898 Peano acquired a small printing establishment in Turin, and he soon became an accomplished printer; his skill seems to have been of help to him in the process of simplifying logico-mathematical symbolism.

Peano's contributions to mathematics include the first statement of vector calculus (Elementi di calcolo geometrico, Turin, 1891) and the first example of integration by successive approximations within the theory of ordinary differential equations; with the single hypothesis that the data were continuous he...