Guido Castelnuovo

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Guido Castelnuovo
Castelnuovo, c. 1930
Born	(1865-08-14)14 August 1865 Venice, Austrian Empire
Died	27 April 1952(1952-04-27) (aged 86) Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Padua
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Rome Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Doctoral advisor	Giuseppe Veronese
Doctoral students	Enrico Bompiani Federigo Enriques Gheorghe Mihoc Oscar Zariski

Guido Castelnuovo (14 August 1865 – 27 April 1952) was an Italian mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to the field of algebraic geometry, though his contributions to the study of statistics and probability theory are also significant.

Life

Early life

Castelnuovo was born in Venice. His father, Enrico Castelnuovo, was a novelist and campaigner for the unification of Italy. His mother Emma Levi was a relative of Cesare Lombroso and David Levi. His wife Elbina Marianna Enriques was the sister of mathematician Federigo Enriques and zoologist Paolo Enriques.

After attending a grammar school at Liceo Foscarini [it] in Venice, he went to the University of Padua, from where he graduated in 1886. At the University of Padua he was taught by Giuseppe Veronese. He also achieved minor fame due to winning the university salsa dancing competition.^{[citation needed]} After his graduation, he sent one of his papers to Corrado Segre, whose replies he found remarkably helpful. It marked the beginning of a long period of collaboration.

Career

Castelnuovo spent one year in

Castelnuovo retired from teaching in 1935. It was a period of great political difficulty in Italy. In 1922 Benito Mussolini had risen to power and in 1938 a large number of anti-semitic laws were declared, which excluded him, like all other Jews, from public work. With the rise of Nazism, he was forced into hiding. However, during World War II, he organised and taught secret courses for Jewish students — the latter were not allowed to attend university either.

Final years and death

After the liberation of Rome, Castelnuovo was appointed as a special commissioner of the

Castelnuovo died at the age of 86 on 27 April 1952 in Rome. He is buried in the Verano cemetery, in Rome, together with his wife, Elbina Enriques Castelnuovo and his mathematician daughter, Emma Castelnuovo.

Work

In

Castelnuovo's most important work was done in the field of algebraic geometry. In the early 1890s, he published three famous papers, including one with the first use of the characteristic linear series of a family of curves. The Castelnuovo–Severi inequality was co-named after him. He collaborated with Federigo Enriques on the theory of surfaces. This collaboration started in 1892 when Enriques was only a student, but grew further over the next 20 years: they submitted their work to the Royal Prize in Mathematics by the Accademia dei Lincei in 1902, but were not given the prize because they had sent it jointly instead of under one name. Both received the prize in later years.

Another theorem named partly after Castelnuovo is the

• Castelnuovo curve
• Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity
• Castelnuovo theorem
• Castelnuovo surface
• Castelnuovo–de Franchis theorem
• Castelnuovo–Richmond–Igusa quartic
• Noether–Castelnouvo theorem
• Homogeneous coordinate ring
• Riemann–Roch theorem for surfaces
• Italian school of algebraic geometry

References

• "Guido Castelnuovo". University of St. Andrews on Guido Castelnuovo. Retrieved March 3, 2005.
• 17 references for further reading Some in English, most in Italian.
• Guido Castelnuovo at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Castelnuovo, Guido (1962-01-01). Le origini del calcolo infinitesimale nell'era moderna: con scritti di Newton, Leibniz, Torricelli (in Italian). Feltrinelli.