Michelangelo Ricci was born on 30 January 1619 in Rome, then capital of the Papal States, to a family of low social standing that originated in Bergamo.

He was a friend of Evangelista Torricelli, kept close links with contemporary scientific culture, and played an important role in the development of the Galilean school.

Like de Sluze, he spent his entire career in the Roman Catholic Church and served the pope in various roles on several occasions.

He played a significant part in the theoretical debates and experiments that led up to Torricelli's discovery of atmospheric pressure and invention of the mercury barometer.

In this book he provides a critique of the solutions given by the geometer Marino Ghetaldi of Ragusa in his De Resolutione et Compositione Matematica to the problems posed by Apollonius of Perga.

[1] His published mathematical work is summarised in a treatise of nineteen pages, Exercitatio geometrica, de maximis et minimis (1666) in which he studies the maxima of functions of the form

He collaborated with Nardi on his Scene, an unpublished manuscript that circulated among Torricelli and others, in which Ricci included some of the material that would later appear in his 1666 Geometrica Exercitatio.

Ricci was also the backer of Abbot Francesco Nazzari in the publication of the first review of Italian literature, the Giornale de' Letterati (1668-1683).