The Collected Papers Of Wei Liang Chow

This invaluable book contains the collected papers of Prof Wei-Liang Chow, an original and versatile mathematician of the 20th Century. Prof Chow''s name has become a household word in mathematics because of the Chow ring, Chow coordinates, and Chow''s theorem on analytic sets in projective spaces. The Chow ring has many advantages and is widely used in intersection theory of algebraic geometry. Chow coordinates have been a very versatile tool in many aspects of algebraic geometry. Chow''s theorem OCo that a compact analytic variety in a projective space is algebraic OCo is justly famous; it shows the close analogy between algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.About Professor Wei-Liang ChowThe long and distinguished career of Prof Wei-Liang Chow (1911OCo95) as a mathematician began in China with professorships at the National Central University in Nanking (1936OCo37) and the National Tung-Chi University in Shanghai (1946OCo47), and ultimately led him to the United States, where he joined the mathematics faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, first as an associate professor from 1948 to 1950, then as a full professor from 1950 until his retirement in 1977.In addition to serving as chairman of the mathematics department at Johns Hopkins from 1955 to 1965, he was Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Mathematics from 1953 to 1977."

This invaluable book contains the collected papers of Prof Wei-Liang Chow, an original and versatile mathematician of the 20th Century. Prof Chow's name has become a household word in mathematics because of the Chow ring, Chow coordinates, and Chow's theorem on analytic sets in projective spaces. The Chow ring has many advantages and is widely used in intersection theory of algebraic geometry. Chow coordinates have been a very versatile tool in many aspects of algebraic geometry. Chow's theorem ? that a compact analytic variety in a projective space is algebraic ? is justly famous; it shows the close analogy between algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.About Professor Wei-Liang ChowThe long and distinguished career of Prof Wei-Liang Chow (1911-95) as a mathematician began in China with professorships at the National Central University in Nanking (1936-37) and the National Tung-Chi University in Shanghai (1946-47), and ultimately led him to the United States, where he joined the mathematics faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, first as an associate professor from 1948 to 1950, then as a full professor from 1950 until his retirement in 1977.In addition to serving as chairman of the mathematics department at Johns Hopkins from 1955 to 1965, he was Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Mathematics from 1953 to 1977.

Algebra, as a subdiscipline of mathematics, arguably has a history going back some 4000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. The history, however, of what is recognized today as high school algebra is much shorter, extending back to the sixteenth century, while the history of what practicing mathematicians call "modern algebra" is even shorter still. The present volume provides a glimpse into the complicated and often convoluted history of this latter conception of algebra by juxtaposing twelve episodes in the evolution of modern algebra from the early nineteenth-century work of Charles Babbage on functional equations to Alexandre Grothendieck's mid-twentieth-century metaphor of a ``rising sea'' in his categorical approach to algebraic geometry. In addition to considering the technical development of various aspects of algebraic thought, the historians of modern algebra whose work is united in this volume explore such themes as the changing aims and organization of the subject as well as the often complex lines of mathematical communication within and across national boundaries. Among the specific algebraic ideas considered are the concept of divisibility and the introduction of non-commutative algebras into the study of number theory and the emergence of algebraic geometry in the twentieth century. The resulting volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern mathematics in general and modern algebra in particular. It will be of particular interest to mathematicians and historians of mathematics.

This book presents proceedings from the Japan-U.S. Mathematics Institute (JAMI) Conference on Birational Algebraic Geometry in Memory of Wei-Liang Chow, held at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in April 1996. These proceedings bring to light the many directions in which birational algebraic geometry is headed. Featured are problems on special models, such as Fanos and their fibrations, adjunctions and subadjunction formuli, projectivity and projective embeddings, and more. Some papers reflect the very frontiers of this rapidly developing area of mathematics. Therefore, in the cases, only directions are given without complete explanations or proofs.

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