Everything about Italian School Of Algebraic Geometry totally explained
In relation with the history of
mathematics, the
Italian school of algebraic geometry refers to the work over half a century or more (flourishing roughly 1885-1935) done internationally in
birational geometry, particularly on
algebraic surfaces. There were in the region of 30 to 40 leading mathematicians who made major contributions; about half of those being in fact Italian. There is no question that the leadership fell to the group in
Rome of
Guido Castelnuovo,
Federigo Enriques and
Francesco Severi; who were involved in some of the deepest discoveries, as well as setting the style.
Algebraic surfaces
The emphasis on
algebraic surfaces —
algebraic varieties of
dimension two — followed on from an essentially complete geometric theory of
algebraic curves (dimension 1). The position in around 1870 was that the curve theory had incorporated with
Brill-Noether theory the
Riemann-Roch theorem in all its refinements (via the detailed geometry of the
theta-divisor).
The
classification of algebraic surfaces was a bold and successful attempt to repeat the division of curves by their
genus g. It corresponds to the rough classification into the three types:
g= 0 (projective line);
g = 1 (
elliptic curve); and
g > 1 (
Riemann surfaces with independent holomorphic differentials). In the case of surfaces, the Enriques classification was into five similar big classes, with three of those being analogues of the curve cases, and two more (elliptic fibrations, and
K3 surfaces, as they'd now be called) being with the case of two-dimension
abelian varieties in the 'middle' territory. This was an essentially sound, breakthrough set of insights, recovered in modern
complex manifold language by
Kunihiko Kodaira in the 1950s, and refined to include mod p phenomena by Zariski, the
Shafarevich school and others by around 1960. The form of the
Riemann-Roch theorem on a surface was also worked out.
Foundational issues
Qualification of what was actually proved is necessary because of the foundational difficulties. These included intensive use of birational models in dimension 3 of surfaces that can have non-singular models only when embedded in higher-dimensional
projective space. That is, the theory wasn't posed in an intrinsic way. To get round that, a sophisticated theory of handling a
linear system of divisors was developed (in effect, a
line bundle theory for hyperplane sections of putative embeddings in projective space). Many of the modern techniques were found, in embryo form, and in some cases the articulation of those exceeded the available technical language.
The geometers
The roll of honour of the school includes the following major Italians:
Albanese, Bertini, Campedelli,
Guido Castelnuovo,
Oscar Chisini,
Federigo Enriques,
Michele De Franchis,
Pasquale del Pezzo,
Beniamino Segre,
Corrado Segre,
Francesco Severi,
Guido Zappa (with contributions also from
Luigi Cremona,
Gino Fano, Rosati, Torelli,
Giuseppe Veronese).
Elsewhere it involved
H. F. Baker and P. Duval (UK),
A. B. Coble and
Oscar Zariski (USA),
Charles Émile Picard (France),
Lucien Godeaux (Belgium), G. Humbert,
Hermann Schubert and
Max Noether, and later
Erich Kähler (Germany),
H. G. Zeuthen (Denmark).
These figures were all involved in algebraic geometry, rather than the pursuit of
projective geometry as
synthetic geometry, which during the period under discussion was a huge (in volume terms) but secondary subject (when judged by its importance as research).
Advent of topology
The new algebraic geometry that would succeed the Italian school was distinguished also by the intensive use of
algebraic topology. The founder of that tendency was
Henri Poincaré; during the 1930s it was developed by
Lefschetz,
Hodge and
Todd. The modern synthesis brought together their work, that of the
Cartan school, and of
W.L. Chow and
Kunihiko Kodaira, with the traditional material.
From the 1950s
The fashion and foundational attitude changed in algebraic geometry from 1950 onwards, leading to an axiomatisation and some acrimony as to the status of some results. For a while it may have seemed that the tradition of the Italian school would possibly be lost, in the sense that the old papers had become hard to read for the new generation of geometers.
The essentials were in fact transmitted, in particular through
Zariski's students. Some of the areas opened up, such as
moduli spaces for curves, have been at the centre of recent work related to
physics. Very many of the fundamental concepts in algebraic geometry still bear the names of those of the Italian school.
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