Originally from a small village in the Alps, the Italian mathematician Gianfrancesco Malfatti received his early education from the Jesuits in Verona. Then, at the University of Bologna, he became one of the founders of the mathematics department at the University of Ferrara, a city in Emilia-Romagna where he would die in 1807. He played an important role in the creation of *Prodromo della Nuova Enciclopedia Italiana (1779), a work in the spirit of theEncyclopédie* by Diderot and d'Alembert.
Giovanni Francesco Malfatti (1731–1807).
Malfatti is best known for one of his papers, published in 1804 (Memoria sopra un problema stereotomico), in which he poses the following problem: how should three non-overlapping circles be chosen within a triangle so as to minimize the area of the triangle left over once the three circles are removed?
Malfatti's idea and motivation were to cut three cylindrical columns from a triangular marble prism, and thus to minimize the loss of this precious material. In his paper, he conjectured that the three circles had to be tangent to one another and each tangent to two sides of the triangle. Malfatti determined these three circles analytically. However, as is often the case when a problem bears someone's name, this attribution is doubtful.
