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Published February 2011 | Published
Journal Article Open

Federigo Enriques's Quest to Prove the "Completeness Theorem"

Abstract

The golden age of the Italian school of algebraic geometry began with Antonio Luigi Gaudenzio Giuseppe Cremona and included among its main contributors Enrico Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques, and Francesco Severi. The Italian school spanned nearly a century, from the unification of Italy in 1861 to Enriques's posthumously published post- World War II monograph on algebraic surfaces [Enrq 49]. In the 1890s Enriques, a mathematician who once quipped that "intuition is the aristocratic way of discovery, rigour the plebian way" [Hodge 48], and his colleague and future brother-in-law Castelnuovo began their monumental work on the birational theory of algebraic surfaces over the complex numbers C. Severi joined them in this effort a few years later.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Mathematical Society. We thank David Mumford, who put his deep knowledge of the history and mathematics related to the Completeness Theorem at our disposal; Steven Kleiman for suggesting many improvements, both historical and mathematical, to the original text; Lorenzo Enriques for permission to publish his grandfather's letter and information about his family; Sergio Segre for opening Beniamino Segre's papers to scholars; Elisa Piccio, Michele Vallisneri, and Annalisa Capristo for discussions; Francesca Rosa for archival research in Rome and Pisa; and Sara Lippincott for editorial suggestions.

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August 19, 2023
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