Francesco Severi

Francesco Severi
Born	13 April 1879 (1879-04-13) Arezzo, Italy
Died	8 December 1961(1961-12-08) (aged 82) Rome, Italy
Alma mater	Università di Torino, 1900
Known for	Algebraic geometry, several complex variables
Awards	Gold medal of the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL (1906) Prix Bordin (1907) (jointly with Federigo Enriques) Guccia Medal (1908) "Premio reale" of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1913)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Università di Torino, Università di Bologna, Università di Padova, Università di Roma, Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica (now Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica Francesco Severi)
Doctoral advisor	Corrado Segre
Other academic advisors	Enrico d'Ovidio, Federigo Enriques, Eugenio Bertini
Doctoral students	Aldo Andreotti, Enzo Martinelli, Guido Zappa
Other notable students	Luigi Fantappiè, Gaetano Fichera

Francesco Severi (13 April 1879 – 8 December 1961) was an Italian mathematician. He was the chair of the committee on Fields Medal in 1936, at the first delivery.

Severi was born in Arezzo, Italy. He is famous for his contributions to algebraic geometry and the theory of functions of several complex variables. He became the effective leader of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. Together with Federigo Enriques, he won the Bordin prize from the French Academy of Sciences.

He contributed in a major way to birational geometry, the theory of algebraic surfaces, in particular of the curves lying on them, the theory of moduli spaces and the theory of functions of several complex variables. He wrote prolifically, and some of his work (following the intuition-led approach of Federigo Enriques) has subsequently been shown to be not rigorous according to the then new standards set in particular by Oscar Zariski and André Weil. Although many of his arguments have since been made rigorous, a significant fraction were not only lacking in rigor but also wrong (in contrast to the work of Enriques, which though not rigorous was almost entirely correct). At the personal level, according to Roth (1963) he was easily offended, and he was involved in a number of controversies. Most notably, he was a staunch supporter of the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and was included on a committee of academics that was to conduct an anti-semitic purge of all scholarly societies and academic institutions.^[1]