Guido Castelnuovo

Guido Castelnuovo (1865–1952) was an Italian mathematician and one of the leading representatives of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. Born in Venice to a father who was a novelist and activist for Italian unification, he studied in Padua under Giuseppe Veronese, who instilled in him a taste for geometry. At this time, he began a fruitful collaboration with Corrado Segre. In 1891, he was appointed to the chair of analytic and projective geometry at the University of Rome, where he worked alongside Luigi Cremona and with Federigo Enriques. The bulk of his scientific contributions concerned algebraic geometry: the study of algebraic curves, linear systems of plane curves, and birational invariants. With Enriques, he developed, from 1892 onwards, a thorough theory of algebraic surfaces, which remains one of the major achievements of Italian geometry. He was also interested in algebraic functions, Abelian integrals, statistics, and probability. Having founded the School of Statistics at the University of Rome in 1927, he exerted considerable influence on the mathematicians of the following generation. Dismissed from the university in 1935 under the antisemitic laws of the Fascist regime, he continued to teach Jewish students clandestinely during the Second World War. After the Liberation, he became involved in reorganising Italian scientific institutions through the National Research Council and was elected senator in 1949. His publications include Geometria analitica e proiettiva (1903), Calcolo della probabilità e applicazioni (1919), and Le origini del calcolo infinitesimale nell'era moderna.