Olinto De Pretto

Olinto De Pretto (26 April 1857 – 16 March 1921) was an Italian industrialist and geologist from Schio, Vicenza. It is claimed by an Italian mathematician, Umberto Bartocci, that De Pretto may have been the first person to derive the energy–mass-equivalence E = m c 2 {\displaystyle E=mc^{2}} , generally attributed to Albert Einstein. But this is refuted by Ignazio Marchioro in Quaderni di Schio, where it shows that the similarity was a coincidence, and that the energy proposed by De Pretto doubles the one of Einstein's formula. Also, De Pretto suggested that radioactive decay of uranium and thorium was an example of mass transforming into energy.