On Grioli's minimum property and its relation to Cauchy's polar decomposition

The unitary polar factor of a matrix F is the unitary matrix Q realizing the minimum of the norm of F-Q over all unitary matrices Q. Tracing back the development on the optimality of the polar factor to its presumable roots, in this paper we present a commented translation of a note by G. Grioli from 1940 (Boll.Un.Math.Ital.2,452-455(1940)) showing the minimization property for the Frobenius norm in dimension 3; in his words: "We show that for the homogeneous displacement, tangent to any finite displacement, there exists a minimum property completely analogous to a well known property valid for infinitesimal displacements." Keywords: polar decomposition, optimality of the polar factor, Euclidean distance, geodesic distance, Euclidean movement