Problems of Method in Levi-Civita’s Contributions to Hydrodynamics
Levi-Civita made important contributions to hydrodynamics: he solved D’Alembert’s paradox, introduced the “wake hypothesis”, deduced the general integral of any plane motion involving a wake, and gave a rigorous proof of the existence of the irrotational wave in a canal of finite depth. In this paper, we investigate Levi-Civita’s results in this area, and connect them to the methods of the new theory of integral equations. Finally, we give some information on Levi-Civita’s students. In our paper,...