He then entered young Torricelli into a Jesuit College in 1624, possibly the one in Faenza itself, to study mathematics and philosophy until 1626, by which time his father, Gaspare, had died.

[5] "Benedetto Castelli made experiments on running water (1628), and he was entrusted by Pope Urban VIII with hydraulic undertakings.

[8] In 1632, shortly after the publication of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Torricelli wrote to Galileo of reading it "with the delight ... of one who, having already practiced all of geometry most diligently ... and having studied Ptolemy and seen almost everything of Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Longomontanus, finally, forced by the many congruences, came to adhere to Copernicus, and was a Galileian in profession and sect".

(The Vatican condemned Galileo in June 1633, and this was the only known occasion on which Torricelli openly declared himself to hold the Copernican view.)

[5] "(T)his short intercourse with the great mathematician enabled Torricelli to finish the fifth dialogue under the personal direction of its author; it was published by Viviani, another pupil of Galileo, in 1674.

In this new role he solved some of the great mathematical problems of the day, such as finding a cycloid's area and center of gravity.

[5] Little was known about Torricelli in regard to his works in geometry when he accepted the honorable position, but after he published Opera Geometrica two years later, he became highly esteemed in that discipline.

[9] "He was interested in Optics, and invented a method whereby microscopic lenses might be made of glass which could be easily melted in a lamp.

"[6] As a result, he designed and built a number of telescopes and simple microscopes; several large lenses, engraved with his name, are still preserved in Florence.

On 11 June 1644, he famously wrote in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci: Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d'un pelago d'aria.

)[10]However his work on the cycloid involved him in a controversy with Gilles de Roberval, who accused him of plagiarizing his earlier solution of the problem of its quadrature.

[11] Torricelli died of fever, most likely typhoid,[12][13] in Florence on 25 October 1647,[14] 10 days after his 39th birthday, and was buried at the Basilica of San Lorenzo.

"Belonging to that first period are his pamphlets on Solidi spherali, Contatti and the major part of the propositions and sundry problems which were gathered together by Viviani after Torricelli's death.

In 1830, botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle published Torricellia, which is a genus of flowering plants from Asia belonging to the family Torricelliaceae.

[15] The perusal of Galileo's Two New Sciences (1638) inspired Torricelli with many developments of the mechanical principles there set forth, which he embodied in a treatise De motu (printed amongst his Opera geometrica, 1644).

[17] The barometer arose from the need to solve a theoretical and practical problem: a suction pump could only raise water up to a height of 10 metres (34 ft) (as recounted in Galileo's Two New Sciences).

In the early 1600s, Torricelli's teacher, Galileo, argued that suction pumps were able to draw water from a well because of the "force of vacuum.

A second unambiguous prediction of Torricelli's sea of air hypothesis was made by Blaise Pascal, who argued, and proved, that the mercury column of the barometer should drop at higher elevations.

As we know now, the column's height fluctuates with atmospheric pressure at the same location, a fact which plays a key role in weather forecasting.

Torricelli also discovered a law, regarding the speed of a fluid flowing out of an opening, which was later shown to be a particular case of Bernoulli's principle.

So if the container is an upright cylinder with a small leak at the bottom and y is the depth of the water at time t, then for some constant k > 0.

This was seen as an "incredible" paradox by many at the time, including Torricelli himself, and prompted a fierce controversy about the nature of infinity, also involving the philosopher Hobbes.

[22] Several Italian Navy submarines were named after Evangelista Torricelli: His original manuscripts are preserved at Florence, Italy.