Oscar Zariski

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Oscar Zariski
S. S. Abhyankar
Michael Artin
Iacopo Barsotti
Irvin Cohen
Daniel Gorenstein
Robin Hartshorne
Heisuke Hironaka
Steven Kleiman
Joseph Lipman
David Mumford
Maxwell Rosenlicht
Pierre Samuel
Abraham Seidenberg

Oscar Zariski (April 24, 1899 – July 4, 1986) was a Russian-born American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.

Education

Zariski was born Oscher (also transliterated as Ascher or Osher) Zaritsky to a Jewish family (his parents were Bezalel Zaritsky and Hanna Tennenbaum) and in 1918 studied at the

University of Kyiv. He left Kyiv in 1920 to study at the University of Rome where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, studying with Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi
.

Zariski wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1924 on a topic in Galois theory, which was proposed to him by Castelnuovo. At the time of his dissertation publication, he changed his name to Oscar Zariski.

Johns Hopkins University years

Zariski emigrated to the United States in 1927 supported by Solomon Lefschetz. He had a position at Johns Hopkins University where he became professor in 1937. During this period, he wrote Algebraic Surfaces as a summation of the work of the Italian school. The book was published in 1935 and reissued 36 years later, with detailed notes by Zariski's students that illustrated how the field of algebraic geometry had changed. It is still an important reference.

It seems to have been this work that set the seal of Zariski's discontent with the approach of the Italians to

infinitely near points to be introduced to account for limiting behaviour along different directions. This introduces a need, in the surface case, to use also valuation theory to describe the phenomena such as blowing up
(balloon-style, rather than explosively).

Harvard University years

After spending a year 1946–1947 at the

Riemann hypothesis for curves over finite fields
, a direction rather oblique to Zariski's interests. The two sets of foundations weren't reconciled at that point.

At Harvard, Zariski's students included

moduli theory and cohomology in the next generation. Zariski himself worked on equisingularity theory. Some of his major results, Zariski's main theorem and the Zariski theorem on holomorphic functions, were amongst the results generalized and included in the programme of Alexander Grothendieck
that ultimately unified algebraic geometry.

Zariski proposed the first example of a Zariski surface in 1958.

Views

Zariski was a

Jewish atheist.[1]

Awards and recognition

Zariski was elected to the United States

Steele Prize in 1981, and in the same year the Wolf Prize in Mathematics with Lars Ahlfors. He wrote also Commutative Algebra in two volumes, with Pierre Samuel. His papers have been published by MIT Press, in four volumes. In 1997 a conference was held in his honor in Obergurgl, Austria.[5][6]

Publications

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 9780387094298
    . And yet it did, even though since moving into the boarding house he had become an atheist and most of his friends, including his best friend, were Russians.
  2. ^ "Oscar Zariski". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2023-02-16.
  3. ^ "Oscar Zariski". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 9 February 2023. Retrieved 2023-02-16.
  4. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2023-02-16.
  5. ISBN 978-3-7643-6178-5
    .
  6. ISSN 0273-0979
    .
  7. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1936-06238-5
    .
  8. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1959-10267-6
    .
  9. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1962-10674-0
    .
  10. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1988-15651-0
    .

References

External links

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