palatini

Palatini is an Italian surname. It is borne by several individuals in science, culture, and public life, and in some contexts the name is used to refer to concepts or ideas associated with those individuals.

In physics, the Palatini formalism is a formulation of general relativity in which the metric and the affine connection are treated as independent variables during the variation of the action. It was introduced by Italian physicist Attilio Palatini. For the Einstein–Hilbert action, varying with respect to the connection enforces that the connection be the Levi-Civita connection of the metric, yielding the standard Einstein field equations. In modified gravity theories, allowing independent variation can lead to different dynamics and field equations, offering alternative approaches to gravitational phenomena.

Etymology and usage: The surname Palatini comes from the Italian word palatino, meaning “of the palace,” which itself derives from Latin palatinus. The term Palatini thus originates as a family name and, in scholarly contexts, is attached to the variational principle in gravity. In English texts it is capitalized when referring to the surname or the formalism, while the lowercase form palatini may appear in Latin phrases or historical anatomical or scholarly terminology.