Ottaviano-Fabrizio Mossotti

Ottaviano-Fabrizio Mossotti was an Italian physicist exiled from Italy for his liberal ideas. During the First Italian War of Independence, he led a "battalion of students," part of a delegation from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. He later taught astronomy and physics at the University of Buenos Aires. His name is associated with a type of multiple-element lens correcting spherical aberration and coma, but not chromatic aberration. His studies on dielectrics lead to important results: the Clausius-Mossotti formula is partly named after him, and his view on dielectric behavior lead James Clerk Maxwell to devise his displacement current which, included in his equations lead to the theoretical intuition of electromagnetic waves.