Nicola Cufaro Petroni
Nicola Cufaro Petroni | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 28, 1949 Bari, Italy |
| Died | June 26, 2023 (aged 74) |
| Residence | 70125 Bari, Italy |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Alma mater | University of Bari |
| Known for | Stochastic mechanics, Lévy processes, Stochastic analysis in finance |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics, Probability, Mathematical statistics |
| Institutions | University of Bari, INFN Bari |
Nicola Cufaro Petroni (28 March 1949 – 26 June 2023) was an Italian theoretical physicist and mathematician, associate professor of Probability and Mathematical Statistics at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Bari, and a member of the Bari section of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). He was known for his work on stochastic mechanics and the foundations of quantum mechanics, on Lévy processes, and on stochastic analysis applied to finance.
Biography
Cufaro Petroni was born in Bari on 28 March 1949 and graduated in Physics at the University of Bari in June 1972. He spent his academic career at the University of Bari, where he was appointed associate professor of Probability and Mathematical Statistics (MAT/06) in the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences on 1 November 2002, and continued in the same role in the Department of Mathematics from 1 November 2012. He also collaborated with the Bari section of the INFN.
He supervised numerous master's and doctoral theses and was instrumental in establishing a curriculum in mathematics for finance within the master's degree programme in Mathematics at Bari. He took an active part in the governance of the university through its collegiate bodies.
Outside of science, Cufaro Petroni was a violinist, holding a diploma from the "N. Piccinni" Conservatory of Bari, where he taught physical acoustics for several years, and he organised concert activities at the university. He was an advocate for peace and disarmament, being active in the Unione Scienziati Per Il Disarmo (Union of Scientists for Disarmament) and a member of the Peace Committee for the Terra di Bari.
He died on 26 June 2023.
Scientific contributions
Cufaro Petroni authored more than eighty papers in international journals. His research topics included the dynamics and control of stochastic processes, stochastic mechanics in the tradition of Nelson's derivation of the Schrödinger equation from diffusion processes, the entanglement of quantum states and the foundations of quantum mechanics, Lévy processes and their applications to physical systems such as particle beam dynamics, and quantitative finance and Monte Carlo simulation methods.
Publications
- Probability and Stochastic Processes for Physicists, UNITEXT for Physics, Springer, 2020.
- Lezioni di Calcolo delle Probabilità (in Italian), lecture notes on probability theory.