Person: Roth, Leonard
Leonard Roth was an English mathematician who worked on Algebraic Geometry.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- A Hebrew tutor came to the house to teach Leonard.
- Leonard attended Latymer Elementary School, beginning in 1914 and, three years later, was admitted to Latymer Upper School.
- Latymer School realised that Leonard needed tuition at a level they could not give in order to gain a Mathematics Scholarship to Cambridge and it was with the headmaster's agreement that he went for a term in autumn 1922, before the Cambridge scholarship examinations, to attend Dulwich College.
- The year in Italy was an extremely profitable time for Roth, for there he met many of the great Italian mathematicians and he learnt a great deal from Castelnuovo, Enriques, and Levi-Civita in addition to Severi.
- The marriage seems to have resulted in Roth's estrangement from his parents.
- After Roth returned to London from Rome in 1931, he was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer in Mathematics at Imperial College.
- Also highlighted in this review is the informality of Roth's approach, which again was typical of all his work.
- The famous book we referred to is Introduction to Algebraic Geometry which Roth wrote with Jack Semple, and it was published in 1949.
- Another text written by Roth is Algebraic threefolds, with special regard to problems of rationality (1955).
- In addition we should mention Roth's other books: Elements of probability (1936), written with Hyman Levy, and Modern elementary geometry (1948).
- This seems to confirm that Leonard had kept alive his feeling for his Jewish roots although those who knew him in the 1950s confirm that he was no longer active or observant in Judaism.
- Marcella Roth was an outstanding pianist, and Leonard too was very musical, with a vast collection of gramophone records, always being played.
- Their house was full of beautiful pictures and objects, so that the friends and Italian relatives of the Roths were greatly distressed when the solicitors acting as sole executors summarily disposed of the house and its contents.
Born 29 August 1904, Edmonton, London, England. Died 28 November 1968, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin England
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- 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
