Person: Andreotti, Aldo
Aldo Andreotti was an Italian mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, on the theory of functions of several complex variables and on partial differential operators.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- After his secondary education, Aldo entered the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in October 1942 where he attended courses by Leonida Tonelli.
- However, after divisions of the German army entered Italy in 1943, Andreotti escaped to Switzerland since all Italian men over the age of 18 risked being deported by the Germans to labour camps, from which many did not return.
- After graduating from Pisa, Andreotti went to Rome where he studied for three years with Francesco Severi.
- Severi was, by this time, involved in many non-mathematical pursuits, but these years, first as a research student at the National Institute of Advanced Mathematics (INdAM), and later as an assistant in geometry, were important years during which Andreotti became an extremely innovative mathematician.
- Severi quickly realised that he had an extremely talented pupil and greatly admired Andreotti's talents.
- In 1950 Andreotti went to the Princeton in the United States where he spent several months.
- This was an important period for Andreotti who came in contact with leading mathematicians such as Kunihiko Kodaira, Solomon Lefschetz, Carl Ludwig Siegel, Donald Spencer, André Weil and Oscar Zariski.
- This time at Princeton allowed Andreotti to greatly broaden his mathematical knowledge, for he learnt about the latest developments in algebra, general topology, algebraic topology and other areas which at that time were not being studied in Italy.
- Beniamino Segre was one of the judges on the selection committee that chose Andreotti who, within a few weeks, moved to Turin.
- in 1951, with the arrival of Aldo Andreotti.
- Then barely twenty-seven years old, Andreotti had reached an absolutely stunning maturity, coming in large measure from long months spent in the United States close to remarkable mathematicians ...
- At his arrival at Turin, Andreotti had some certainties.
- It was absurd to continue to teach descriptive geometry in the first two years of the mathematics course and Andreotti replaced this by several topics in algebra such as ideal theory, polynomials, resultants etc.
- Before her marriage to Andreotti, she worked for the United States Government in Washington, D.C., and in Rome, Italy.
- In 1956 Andreotti left Turin and went to the University of Pisa.
- Aldo had an acute sensitivity, which had in no way been dulled by dealings with mathematics and with "stars" like me.
- Andreotti published over 100 papers.
- Perhaps his most famous results are his proof of the theorem of Leonida Tonelli (1958), his proof of the duality of Picard and Albanese varieties of algebraic surfaces, his work with A L Mayer on the Schottky problem (1967), and the Andreotti-Vesentini separation theorem which appeared in their joint 1965 paper Carleman estimates for the Laplace-Beltrami equation on complex manifolds.
- This result put into a differential-geometric setting finiteness theorems that Andreotti, in collaboration with Hans Grauert, had published three years earlier in Théorèmes de finitude pour la cohomology of the complexes espaces Ⓣ(Finiteness theorems for the cohomology of complex spaces) concerning cohomology with coefficients on a locally free sheaf on a complex manifold.
- Andreotti was invited to lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Stockholm in 1962.
- Other books by Andreotti are: (with Wilhelm Stoll) Analytic and algebraic dependence of meromorphic functions (1971); Étude de géometrie algébrique Ⓣ(Study of algebraic geometry) (1979); and (with Mauro Nacinovich) Analytic convexity and the principle of Phragmén-Lindelöf (1980).
- a clumsy, chubby fellow shows up and announces that Professor Andreotti will be late, and that he will start the lecture in his stead.
- suddenly, as if materializing out of thin air, Professor Andreotti shows up.
- Professor Andreotti finally open his mouth and utters the following words, in a strong Tuscan accent (how strange it sounded in that momentous event): "Let me tell you one thing.
- Andreotti was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Nice.
- For more than 13 years Andreotti has been a member of the Editorial Board of 'Compositio Matematica'.
Born 15 March 1924, Florence, Italy. Died 21 February 1980, Pisa, Italy.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Italy
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
