Guido Castelnuovo

Guido Castelnuovo (14 August 1865 – 27 April 1952) was an Italian mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to the field of algebraic geometry, though his contributions to the study of statistics and probability theory are also significant. Castelnuovo was born in Venice. His father, Enrico Castelnuovo, was a novelist and campaigner for the unification of Italy. His mother Emma Levi was a relative of Cesare Lombroso and David Levi. His wife Elbina Marianna Enriques was the sister of mathematician Federigo Enriques and zoologist Paolo Enriques. After attending a grammar school at it in Venice, he went to the University of Padua, from where he graduated in 1886. At the University of Padua he was taught by Giuseppe Veronese. He also achieved minor fame due to winning the university salsa dancing competition. After his graduation, he sent one of his papers to Corrado Segre, whose replies he found remarkably helpful. It marked the beginning of a long period of collaboration. Castelnuovo spent one year in Rome to research advanced geometry. After that he was appointed as an assistant of Enrico D'Ovidio at the University of Turin, where he was strongly influenced by Corrado Segre. Here he worked with Alexander von Brill and Max Noether. In 1891 he moved back to Rome to work at the chair of Analytic and Projective Geometry. Here he was a colleague of Luigi Cremona, his former teacher, and took over his job when the later died in 1903. He also founded the University of Rome's School of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences (1927). He influenced a younger generation of Italian mathematicians and statisticians, including Corrado Gini and Francesco Paolo Cantelli. Castelnuovo retired from teaching in 1935. It was a period of great political difficulty in Italy. In 1922 Benito Mussolini had risen to power and in 1938 a large number of anti-semitic laws were declared, which excluded him, like all other Jews, from public work. With the rise of Nazism, he was forced into hiding.

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Related concepts (5)

Intersection theory

In mathematics, intersection theory is one of the main branches of algebraic geometry, where it gives information about the intersection of two subvarieties of a given variety. The theory for varieties is older, with roots in Bézout's theorem on curves and elimination theory. On the other hand, the topological theory more quickly reached a definitive form. There is yet an ongoing development of intersection theory. Currently the main focus is on: virtual fundamental cycles, quantum intersection rings, Gromov-Witten theory and the extension of intersection theory from schemes to stacks.

Italian school of algebraic geometry

In relation to the history of mathematics, the Italian school of algebraic geometry refers to mathematicians and their work in birational geometry, particularly on algebraic surfaces, centered around Rome roughly from 1885 to 1935. There were 30 to 40 leading mathematicians who made major contributions, about half of those being Italian. 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.

Enriques–Kodaira classification

In mathematics, the Enriques–Kodaira classification is a classification of compact complex surfaces into ten classes. For each of these classes, the surfaces in the class can be parametrized by a moduli space. For most of the classes the moduli spaces are well understood, but for the class of surfaces of general type the moduli spaces seem too complicated to describe explicitly, though some components are known. Max Noether began the systematic study of algebraic surfaces, and Guido Castelnuovo proved important parts of the classification.