Gian Francesco Malfatti

He was born in Ala, Trentino, Holy Roman Empire and died in Ferrara.

Malfatti studied at the College of San Francesco Saverio in Bologna where his mentors included Vincenzo Riccati, Laura Bassi, F. M. Zanotti and Gabriele Manfredi.

In 1803, Malfatti posed the problem of carving three circular columns out of a triangular block of marble, using as much of the marble as possible, and conjectured that three mutually tangent circles inscribed within the triangle would provide the optimal solution.

These tangent circles are now known as Malfatti circles after his work, despite the earlier work of Japanese mathematician Ajima Naonobu and of Malfatti's countryman Gilio di Cecco da Montepulciano on the same problem[1][2] and even though the conjecture was later proven false.

[4][5] Additional topics in Malfatti's research concerned quintic equations, and the property of the lemniscate of Bernoulli that a ball rolling down an arc of the lemniscate, under the influence of gravity, will take the same time to traverse it as a ball rolling down a straight line segment connecting the endpoints of the arc.