Igor Rostislavowitsch Schafarewitsch

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Igor Schafarewitsch (undated)

Igor Shafarevich (also Igor Shafarevich , Russian Игорь Ростиславович Шафаревич , scientific. Transliteration Igor 'Rostislavovič Šafarevič ; * 3. June 1923 in Zhytomyr ; † 19th February 2017 ) was a leading Russian mathematician who, especially in the fields of number theory , algebra and algebraic geometry worked.

life and work

Schafarewitsch showed mathematical talent at an early age and read David Hilbert's number report when he was 15 . He studied a. a. with Boris Delone and was promoted early on by Lev Pontryagin and Ivan Winogradow . Pontryagin in particular pushed him in the direction of algebraic geometry, which was very active at the time and not yet represented in Russia. He received his doctorate in 1946 and became a member of the Steklov Institute for Mathematics in Moscow , then headed by Vinogradov. At only 34 years old, he was accepted into the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . In 1960 he took over the management of the algebra department at the Steklow Institute. He also taught at Moscow University . In the field of number theory, Schafarewitsch attracted attention as early as 1948 with his explicit formula for the reciprocity law of the nth power residues and his work on class field towers.

The Tate-Shafarevich groups in arithmetic geometry are named after him and John T. Tate . A conjecture by Schafarewitsch from 1962 in arithmetic algebraic geometry, which he proved in a special case, played a role in proving the Mordell conjecture by Gerd Faltings , who also proved the Schafarewitsch conjecture.

In the 1960s he was instrumental in founding a school of algebraic geometry in the Soviet Union , which implemented the schema methods of the Grothendieck school. In Moscow his seminar covered a. a. the classification of algebraic surfaces. He gave the methods of the Italian school ( Federigo Enriques et al.) A strict basis and expanded them with his school as well as Kunihiko Kodaira in the west .

In algebra he worked a. a. on the reverse of Galois theory , that is, on the question of which groups are symmetry groups of algebraic equations. In 1964 he and E. S. Golod answered the generalized Burnside problem negatively by proving the existence of an infinite but finitely generated p-group (in which every element has an order that is a power of the prime number p) (the Burnside problem assumed that groups with such properties must be finite).

Schafarewitsch was co-editor of the Soviet-Russian mathematical encyclopedia project from the 1980s.

In 1959 Igor Schafarewitsch received the Lenin Prize . In 1960 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . In 1962 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm (algebraic number fields) and in 1970 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Nice (Le theoreme de Torelli pour les surfaces algebriques de type K3). In 1974 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences . In 2017, the year he died, he received the Leonhard Euler Gold Medal .

His students included Yuri Manin , Igor Dolgachev , Evgeny Golod , Alexei Kostrikin , Andrei Nikolaevich Tyurin , Galina Nikolayevna Tyurina , SP Demushkin, AI Lapin, VV Nikulin, VA Abrashkin, Boris Moishezon , Gennady Vladimirovich Bely , Suren Arakelov , Victor Kolyvagin , A. N. Parshin , Valentine S. Kulikov , Viktor Kulikov and Andrey Todorov .

Political activity

Schafarewitsch (right) in his apartment with some of his students, Helmut Koch is on the left, with Bogomolov and A. N. Todorov next to him

In the Soviet Union, Schafarewitsch was close to the dissidents despite his high academic status. His friend, the mathematician and poet Alexander Jessenin-Wolpin , was one of the first to organize a protest movement (including a demonstration on Pushkin Square) in December 1965. When Yesenin-Wolpin was arrested, Shafarevich signed a petition in his favor and also for Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1972. Sheafarevich also joined Sakharov's Human Rights Committee, founded in 1970. Since he enjoyed a high reputation, every signature by Schafarewitsch was immediately registered abroad and announced on radio stations such as Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. He was therefore dismissed as a professor at Moscow University in 1975.

Schafarewitsch had historical interests, for example in medieval Russian history . In 1975 he published a book in France about - or rather against - socialism , which he sees as an expression of a tendency towards self-destruction (death drive) in history. As in all of his history books, he draws on detailed source studies. His book Russophobia , which has been circulating in samizdat since 1981 and appeared in a magazine in 1989, unleashed a storm of indignation, especially in the USA, because of alleged anti-Semitic coloring. The National Academy of Sciences , of which he had been a member since 1974 and which, according to its statutes, cannot withdraw membership from anyone, approached him in 1992 to voluntarily give up membership. Schafarewitsch then denied accusations of anti-Semitism in an open letter. Schafarewitsch saw in his book Marxism as a way of thinking imposed on the Russians by the West, actually alien to them, which had destroyed their national character, and (an idea from a book by the French Augustin Cochin about what he believed to be a small group of activists who supported the French Revolution triggered, taking up) small groups at work in those responsible for the October Revolution who hated the Russians and which consisted in particular of Jews.

In the early 1990s, Schafarewitsch was also active in radical opposition political movements. In December 1991 he took part in the first Congress of the Russian General People's Union led by Sergei Baburin and in October 1992 he was on the Organizing Committee of the National Salvation Front . In 1993 he ran as a member of the Duma for the Constitutional Democratic Party of Mikhail Astafiev , but was not elected, left the political stage after 1993 and concentrated on the publication of his Russian Collected Works, of which two volumes of political, essayistic and historical writings were published first . From 1993 he worked on his film The Third Patriotic War, in which he implemented his ideas. What was meant was the current difficult situation in Russia, which he saw in the wake of the wars against Napoleon and Hitler.

Fonts

  • Collected papers. Springer, 1989.
  • With Senon Iwanowitsch Borewitsch (Zenon Borevich): Number theory. Birkhäuser, 1966.
  • Basics of Algebraic Geometry. Vieweg and Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1972.
  • Algebraic surfaces. Leipzig 1968.
  • Basic algebraic geometry . 2 volumes. Springer, 1974, 2nd edition 1994.
  • Abelian and nonabelian Mathematics . In: Mathematical Intelligencer , 1991, No. 1.
  • On certain tendencies in the development of mathematics . In: Mathematical Intelligencer , Volume 3, 1981, No. 4.
  • Algebraic number fields. International Congress Mathematicians, Stockholm 1962.
  • With VV Nikulin: Geometries and Groups (Springer Series in Soviet Mathematics). Springer, 1987, 2002.
  • With AI Kostrikin : Basic Notions of Algebra (Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences). Springer, 1989 (Russian original 1987), 3rd edition 2005.
  • With VA Iskovskikh : Algebraic Geometry 2: Cohomology of Algebraic Varieties. Algebraic Surfaces (Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences). Springer, 1994, 2009.

Non-mathematical:

  • The death instinct in the story. Manifestations of socialism. Ullstein, 1980 (Russian original 1975)

literature

  • Michael Artin (Ed.): Arithmetic and Geometry. Papers Dedicated to IR Shafarevich on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. Birkhäuser, 1983, 2 volumes.
  • Smilka Zdravkovska: Listening to Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich . In: Mathematical Intelligencer , 11 (1989), No. 2, pp. 16-28 (interview).
  • Igor Dolgachev: Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich: in Memoriam . 2017, arxiv : 1801.00311

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Умер знаменитый российский математик Игорь Шафаревич . REN-TV , February 20, 2017, accessed February 20, 2017 (Russian).
  2. ↑ Masha Gessen : Dead again - the russian intelligentsia after communism. Verso 1997, p. 36.
  3. ↑ ... as the second youngest scientist in their history, only Andrei Sakharov was younger . Eaten, loc. cit.
  4. ↑ Igor Schafarewitsch. In: Official site of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Retrieved June 24, 2018 (Russian).
  5. ↑ Safarevic's membership entry at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on April 6, 2018.
  6. ^ A b Serge Lang : The Shafarevich Case and the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1007 / 978-1-4612-1638-4_7 . In: Challenges. Springer, 1998. ISBN 978-1-4612-1638-4 .
  7. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project .
  8. ↑ Steklov Institute , with a list of Shafarevich's students
  9. ↑ Solzhenitsyn mentions Schafarewitsch in his autobiographical book The Oak and the Calf.
  10. ↑ 1980 published in English translation, a German translation also appeared.
  11. ^ Letters to the editor on Shafarevich and Russophobia . In: Mathematical Intelligencer , Volume 14, 1992, No. 1,2 (inter alia Joan Birman , Sheldon Axler , Michael Harris ).
  12. ^ Igor Shafarevich: The Socialist Phenomenon .
personal data
SURNAME Schafarewitsch, Igor Rostislavowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Шафаревич, Игорь Ростиславович (Russian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Zhytomyr
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2017