Abstract
MATHEMATICIANS will be pleased to learn that Prof. Guido Castelnuovo, formerly professor of geometry in the University of Rome, is safe and well. In a recent letter to Mr. L. Roth, of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, he relates that he, with members of his family, obtained refuge during the German occupation of Rome, and that he has now returned to his well-known house in the Via Boncompagni. Castelnuovo is eighty years old this year; the world of science will unite in congratulation. Castelnuovo's work (which was reviewed in Nature of December 10, 1938, p. 1016) represents the best in Italian geometrical thought over a long period. Born in an age which, to quote his own phrase, "closed one epoch and opened another", his first papers were, naturally enough, on the projective geometry of higher space. But soon, with Corrado Segre, he was making essential contributions to the algebraic geometry of curves which, sixty years ago, was beginning to assume its modern form. Then, in 1894, with Federigo Enriques as his collaborator, he initiated the study of the algebraic geometry of surfaces, on no firmer a foundation than the hints and conjectures (some of them mistaken) of Max Noether. Much of this work is definitive, in a negative as well as in a positive sense; for where he has paused, his successors in the field have often found it impossible to progress. Perhaps the most celebrated of Castel-nuovo's papers is the memoir of 1896, in which he gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the rationality of a surface, that is, for the existence of a one-to-one algebraic correspondence between the points of the surface and those of a plane. Incidentally, this was quite literally a piece of research, in that the author did not suspect what the conditions were before he began to write the paper. So the theory of rational surfaces was able to take its place by the side of the classical theory of rational curves.
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Prof. Guido Castelnuovo. Nature 155, 385–386 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155385a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155385a0