Corrado Segre

Corrado Segre (20 August 1863 – 18 May 1924) was an Italian mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to the early development of algebraic geometry. Corrado's parents were Abramo Segre and Estella De Benedetti. Segre developed his entire career at the University of Turin, first as a student of Enrico D'Ovidio. In 1883 he published a dissertation on quadrics in projective space and was named as assistant to professors in algebra and analytic geometry. In 1885 he also assisted in descriptive geometry. He began to instruct in projective geometry, as stand-in for Giuseppe Bruno, from 1885 to 1888. Then for 36 years he had the chair in higher geometry following D'Ovidio. Segre and Giuseppe Peano made Turin known in geometry, and their complementary instruction has been noted as follows: "in the mid 1880s, these two very young researchers, Segre and Peano, both of them only just past twenty and both working at the University of Turin, were developing very advanced points of view on fundamental geometrical issues. Although their positions were quite different from one another, they were in some way more complementary than opposed. So it must come as no surprise that Turin was the cradle of some of the most interesting studies on such issues." The Erlangen program of Felix Klein appealed early on to Segre, and he became a promulgator. First, in 1885 he published an article on conics in the plane where he demonstrated how group theory facilitated the study. As Hawkins says (page 252) "the totality of all conics in the plane is identified with P5(C)". The group of its projectivities is then the group that permutes conics. About Segre, Hawkins writes "shortly after he assumed the chair of projective geometry in Turin in 1888, he decided it would be worthwhile to have an Italian translation of the Erlangen Program because he felt its contents were not well enough known among young Italian geometers. ... Segre convinced one of the students at Turin, Gino Fano, to make a translation which was published in Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata in 1889.