The Scientific Manuscripts left Unpublished by Ettore Majorana (with outlines of his life and work)

TL;DR

This paper reviews and contextualizes the unpublished scientific manuscripts of Ettore Majorana, including study notes and research notes, and provides new insights into his life and work based on collected documents.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of Majorana's unpublished manuscripts and shares previously unknown information about his personal and scientific life.

Findings

Publication of Majorana's research notes planned by Springer

New biographical insights into Majorana's life and work

Analysis of Majorana's original study and research notes

Abstract

We present a panoramic view of the main scientific manuscripts left unpublished by the brightest Italian theoretical physicist of the XX century, Ettore Majorana. We deal in particular: (i) with his very original "study" notes (the so-called "Volumetti"), already published by us in English, in 2003, c/o Kluwer Acad.Press, Dordrecht & Boston, and in the original Italian language, in 2006, c/o Zanichelli pub., Bologna, Italy; and (ii) with a selection of his research notes (the so-called "Quaderni"), that we shall publish c/o Springer, Berlin. We seize the present opportunity for setting forth also some suitable -scarcely known- information about Majorana's life and work, on the basis of documents (letters, testimonies, different documents...) discovered or collected by ourselves during the last decades. [A finished, enlarged version of this paper will appear as the editors' Preface, at the beginning of the coming book "Ettore Majorana - Unpublished Research Notes on Theoretical Physics", edited by S.Esposito, E.Recami, A.van der Merwe and R.Battiston, to be printed by Springer verlag, Berlin].