Our Department owns a historical collection of about 120 geometrical shape models and mathematical instruments. The models are built of several materials: about seventy are made of plaster, about thirty of wood, others are made with glass, or celluloid, cardboard, cotton yarn, wire. Among the instruments in the collection there are an intergraph, an ellissoid, and an instrument for checking a property of epicycloids Most of those items were collected between 1880 and 1920; a part of them is industry production (by Brill, Schilling, Coradi, Cussons) but others are local production made on demand. Several mathematicians joined the effort to establish and maintain the collection, among them E. Caporali, E. Cesaro, P. del Pezzo, D. Montesano, and most notably A. Del Re, E. Pascal, R. Marcolongo, who designed much of the locally made items. The collection has been severely damaged during the World War II, and part of it has gone lost. Now it is hosted in the historical building of the Mathematics Department, in Via Mezzocannone 8, in rooms fitted up with furniture of the same times as the items in exhibit.
More detail on this collection can be found in: L. Carbone, G. Cardone, F. Palladino, La Collezione di Strumenti e Modelli matematici del Dipartimento di Matematica e Applicazioni "R. Caccioppoli" dell'Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II", Rend. Acc. Sc. fis. nat. (4), LXIII, (1996), 33-65.
Here you find photos of some of the items in the collection:
