University of São Paulo

uma rota internacional do desenvolvimento da geometria algébrica

Abstract

In this article, we analyze some factors that contributed to the insertion of the University of São Paulo in the international route of the development of algebraic geometry, in the period of 1934 – on the arrival of Italian mathematicians in the subsection of the mathematical sciences of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters - to 1958, the last year in which a bourbakist mathematician was in this faculty performing academic activities. In this context, one brings some evidences from this period that seem to question the crystallized memory of the international community of mathematicians, including the Brazilian one about the use of retrograde methods of Italian mathematics, especially in algebraic geometry. In the analysis, one argues that if in the international level the Italian mathematical style of algebraic geometry was succeeded by the mathematical style of Solomon Lefschetz, André Weil and Oscar Zariski, in the University of São Paulo something analogous happened, insofar as these last two Jewish origin mathematicians, at first, succeeded Giacomo Albanese. Two hirings that seem to have been determined by the scientific value of André Weil and Oscar Zariski, although we have considered that is not negligible the inextricable relationship between this factor and the Jewish “cooperation network” established in that period.