Oscar Zariski — mathematician with roots in the Russian Empire
Oscar Zariski was born Ascher (Osher) Zaritsky on 24 April 1899 in Kobrin, in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Kobryn in Belarus. His parents, Bezalel Zaritsky and Hanna, née Tennenbaum, were Jewish; his father died when Ascher was two, and his mother kept a general store. When the fighting of the First World War reached the region, the family moved to Chernigov in Ukraine.
In 1918 he entered the University of Kiev, where he studied through the turmoil of the Civil War. In 1920 he left Soviet Ukraine for Italy, enrolling first at the University of Pisa and, six months later, at the University of Rome, then the centre of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. He was drawn above all to Guido Castelnuovo, who took him on a three-hour walk around Rome and became his doctoral adviser, and worked also with Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi. It was Enriques who suggested that he change his name to the Italian-sounding Oscar Zariski. He took his doctorate in 1924 and married Yole Cagli, whom he had met in Rome.
On Castelnuovo's recommendation, Solomon Lefschetz helped him to a post at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which he took up in 1927; he became a full professor there in 1937. Over the following decade he set out to rebuild algebraic geometry on rigorous foundations, replacing the Italian school's geometric intuition with the methods of modern commutative algebra: normalisation, valuation theory and the notions now known as the Zariski topology and Zariski's Main Theorem. In 1944 he proved the resolution of singularities for threefolds in characteristic zero, and in 1947 clarified the notion of a simple point.
After a year at the University of Illinois in 1946–47 he moved to Harvard, where he taught until his retirement in 1969 and trained a generation of algebraic geometers. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1944, received the Cole Prize that year and the National Medal of Science in 1965, served as president of the American Mathematical Society in 1969–70, and in 1981 received both the Steele Prize and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, the latter shared with Lars Ahlfors.
He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1986, aged eighty-seven.
"Studied in Kiev from 1918, left for Italy in 1920–21, took his doctorate in Rome in 1924 and moved to the United States in 1927."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kobrin, Grodno Governorate (now Kobryn, Belarus)
Born Ascher Zaritsky in Kobrin, in the Grodno Governorate, in 1899, he grew up there, moved with his family to Chernigov during the First World War and studied at the University of Kiev from 1918 to 1920.
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Kobrin, Grodno Governorate (now Kobryn, Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.