Giacomo Albanese

Giacomo Albanese (born July 11, 1890 in Geraci Siculo in Sicily , † June 8, 1947 in São Paulo ) was an Italian mathematician who dealt with algebraic geometry .

life and work

Albanese went to school in Palermo and from 1909 studied mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa , among others with Eugenio Bertini , Ulisse Dini and Luigi Bianchi . His dissertation from 1913 with Bertini on "Continuous systems of curves on algebraic surfaces " ( Sistemi continui di curve sopra una superficie algebrica ) won the Ulisse-Dini Prize. He was then assistant to Dini in Pisa and, after his death in 1918, assistant to Onatore Nicoletti (1872–1929), giving lectures from 1913 onwards . From 1917 to 1918 he was called up in the First World War . In 1919 he was briefly assistant to Francesco Severi in Padua , one of the leading Italian representatives of algebraic geometry. In 1920, after a competition, he became Professor of Analysis and Algebra at the Naval Academy of Livorno and in 1925 Professor of Projective and Descriptive Geometry at the University of Catania , followed by two years in Palermo from 1927, before becoming Professor of Geometry in Pisa in 1929. In 1936 he was sent to the University of São Paulo , which had been founded two years earlier , where he was supposed to set up teaching with other mathematicians from Europe. He stayed there for the rest of his career, with the exception of a brief return to Italy in 1942. After the war, he was a colleague of Oscar Zariski (visiting professor in São Paulo in 1945) and André Weil (1945 to 1947 in São Paulo), who at that time undertook a re-establishment of algebraic geometry on a stricter basis. Weil also gave the name of the Albanese variety , a generalization of the Jacobi variety of an algebraic curve. Like this, it assigns an Abelian variety to an algebraic variety .

In algebraic geometry, he dealt with, among other things, the resolution of singularities on algebraic surfaces, the gender of algebraic varieties, rational equivalence of 0-cycles (groups of points) on algebraic surfaces and the investigation of curves on algebraic surfaces.

Works

• Ciro Ciliberto , Paulo Ribenboim , Edoardo Sernesi (editors): Collected Papers of Giacomo Albanese , Queen's Papers in Pure and Applied Mathematics 1996

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Giacomo Albanese. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• biography