Giordano Riccati or
Jordan Riccati (
fl. 1782) was the first experimental
mechanician to study material
elastic moduli as we understand them today. His 1782 paper on determining the relative
Young's moduli of steel and brass using flexural vibrations predated
Thomas Young's 1807 paper on the subject of moduli. The ratio that Riccati found was
Even though the experiments were performed more than 200 years ago, this value is remarkably close to accepted values found in engineering handbooks in 2007.