Giovanni Novi’s contributions to the teaching of Geometry

Thanks to the discovery and study of letters among the Italian mathematicians Enrico Betti and Giovanni Novi, we have been able to reconstruct the scientific activity of Novi, not well known up until now. He contributed to process of renovation of teaching and standardise school in the period immediately preceding the Italian Unification by translating and integrating foreign mathematical treatises. In particular, in 1858 he published a translation of the French textbook by Antoine Amiot Leçons nouvelles de géométrie élémentaire. This translation was greatly appreciated thanks to the fact that Novi integrated the treatise with original contributions on projective geometry. By examining his text, we can say that it can be considered an anticipation of those that will be the most popular Italian texts aiming at connecting the teaching with the scientific research, investigating on the relations between pure mathematics and its applications. We contextualize this operation in the historical context in which famous Italian mathematicians worked