Oscar Zariski

Oscar Zariski (1899 to 1986) was a Russian-born American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the twentieth century. Born Osher Zaritsky in Kobrin, he studied in Kiev and then in Rome, where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry under Castelnuovo, Enriques and Severi and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Galois theory in 1924. He emigrated to the United States in 1927, became a professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1937 and moved to Harvard University in 1947, where he stayed until 1969. Dissatisfied with the rigour of the Italian approach, he rebuilt the foundations of algebraic geometry with commutative algebra and valuation theory, and the Zariski topology bears his name. His students included Abhyankar, Hironaka, Mumford, Artin and Kleiman. He won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1981 and served as president of the American Mathematical Society.