Carlo Cattàneo (31 October 1911, San Giorgio Piacentino – 7 March 1979, Rome) was an Italian academic and one of the general relativity theorists and mathematical physicists in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1957 he was appointed a professor at the University of Rome, where he worked under the guidance of Tullio Levi-Civita.
[3] The resulting constitutive equation relating the heat flux and its time rate of change to the temperature gradient has become known as the "Maxwell–Cattaneo law"[4] because James Clerk Maxwell suggested a similar relation in 1867.
[5] From 1972 to 1976 Cattaneo was vice-president of the Comitato Nazionale della Matematica (National Committee of Mathematics) of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council) of Italy.
He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lille and was elected a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.