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Gustavo Colonnetti
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was born in Turin on 8th November 1886. Colonnetti graduated in Civil Engineering with
Camillo Guidi, at the Application School for Engineers (1908), then in Maths with Corrado Segre (1911). Already in 1910 Colonnetti had won the qualification for the university teaching in |
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Sciences of Constructions. In 1911 he became a temporary lecturer in Mechanics Applied to Constructions and Machines at the Superior School of Naval Engineering in Genoa. In 1914 he was called to the chair of Mechanics Applied to Constructions of the Engineering School in Pisa, of which in 1918 he became the director.
In 1920 the professor was called to the Politecnico di Torino to teach Superior Technical Mechanics.
Director of the Politecnico from 1922 to 1925, in 1928 Colonnetti was moved to the chair of Science of the Constructions, following Camillo Guidi.
Pontificial Academist since 1936, member of Catholic Action, Colonnetti refused the subscription to the Fascist Party and to avoid political prosecutions - during last years of the Second World War - he had to fly to Switzerland. In Losanna, together with other intellectualists he created a university campus for refugeed students of whom he was the rector. In exile, he made a deep political and cultural activity co-operating to the "Gazzetta ticinese" (Ticinese Gazette), with the alias of Etegonon.
At the end of the second world war, Colonnetti was appointed member of the Council as a representative of the Christian Democracy and president of Cnr, an office he kept up to 1956, year in which he was appointed as honorary and emeritus president of the very Body.
He had the merit to have established the foundation and organisation of the Italian Dynamometric Institute of Turin (to-day Metrology Institute of the Cnr). His name was given to the National Centre of Mechanical Agriculture and the Centre of Dynamics of Fluids.
Colonnetti was also a member in different academies: the already mentioned Pontificial Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Lincei, the Acadèmie des Sciènces de l'Institut de France, the Polish Academy of Sciences, Literature and Arts. Colonnetti died in Turin on 20th March 1968. We can remember his theory of minimum principle, which clarified unexplained phenomena of the classic theory of elasticity and opened the way to the pre-compressed cement.
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