11 ms·

Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

194 points by boogiemath 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago
Nice little story, the bride was not upset. But a interesting read.
methuselah_in 2y ago
[flagged]
hprotagonist 2y ago
Reminds me of the story about Weiner, who forgot he moved. Apparently a true story, but the version where he also didn’t recognize his daughter (waiting for him at his previous home to show him to the new one) was an embellishment; at his funeral, his daughter said “dad never forgot who his children were”.
- mandibeet 2y ago
  I think such anecdotes and concepts reflect the complexity of human nature
blendergeek 2y ago
Headline should be "Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding" in accordance with HN headline guidelines.
- thih9 2y ago
  Could you cite the guideline? I couldn't find it; I thought the idea is to use the original title where possible. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
  - bonoboTP 2y ago
    It's literal clickbait as you're moved to click to figure out who that man is.
    - nikolajan 2y ago
      This isn't clickbait in the slightest, this low level obsession with labeling anything that isn't entirely descriptive as clickbait is obnoxious. Not every article title has to be "A 500 word blog post on Oscar Zariski, covering years 1899-1960, published May 26th 3PM EST, by Boogie Math"
  - blendergeek 2y ago
    Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding is the original title on the article. The title I objected to was "A man who forgot about his own wedding". This title was actually edited to make it more clickbaity before it was later edited to be less clickbaity.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - raldi 2y ago
    And in this case, it seems misleading and definitely clickbait. The quote at the end doesn't support the claim that he forgot anything. The citation (https://books.google.com/books?id=9zu0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=%22Oscar+Zariski%22+yole+wedding&source=bl&ots=T7Yl8KxkYJ&sig=ACfU3U1-kCFEEA3-wHh09ertpM7ZFRF-ow&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAz5ax6MeHAxU-6ckDHQudFPsQ6AF6BAgfEAM#v=onepage&q=%22Oscar%20Zariski%22%20yole%20wedding&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=9zu0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=P... ) doesn't support the claim either. It sounds more like the story was: While waiting for his wife to arrive at their wedding ceremony, he stepped away and passed the time by working on a problem.
- dang 2y ago
  This seems to be one of those non-converging title sequences because no option satisfies everyone. We eventually changed it to "Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry", even though this omits the anecdote which the thread is mostly about. People won't miss that if they see the article's own title though.
mpalmer 2y ago
I like the post, and I would upvote it if the title was more descriptive of the actual content instead of a clickbait-y "hook" that hints nothing about the topic. I thought I'd be reading about an interesting neuroscience case (or whatever), but it's a review/short synopsis of a mathematician's biography. The wedding anecdote is just the last paragraph.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
Historical footnote: 'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.' I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  She was likely seeing Hasidic Jews, who are quite distinct in the way they live and dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism
  - akolbe 2y ago
    Hasidic teaching stories are charming. Here is one: When Rabbi Zusha was on his deathbed, his students found him in great distress. They tried to comfort him by telling him that he was almost as wise as Moses, so he was sure to be judged positively in Heaven. He replied, "When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses?' They will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?'"
- YZF 2y ago
  I would guess to some extent? I am far from an expert but I don't think late 19th century or early 20th century Europe would be directly comparable to 21st century USA. It's an interesting topic and maybe some starting points are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-population-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-pop... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl Part of my ancestry is European Jewish and I'm sure my grandparents and great grandparents would have stories to tell but I was never interested in this while they were still alive. Kind of funny how that works. They were not religious.
waynecochran 2y ago
I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people. That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
  - jfengel 2y ago
    It kinda depends on how you measure. Basic quality of life went up fast, going from feudal agriculture to an industrial society. But then it stalled. And the process killed literally millions -- some from outright murder, some from overwhelming mismanagement. Many never wanted the Tsars gone to begin with; agricultural societies can be very conservative. And things had been slowly improving under the monarchy, under the same pressures that modernized western Europe in the mid 19th century. Historians cite a lot of mistakes by that last Tsar that could easily have gone the other way and saved the institution. He really screwed it up after a few generations of improvements. So... depends.
  - waynecochran 2y ago
    One metric would be body count. 20th century Marxists are somewhere between 60 and 148 million dead. Hard to top that.
    - datameta 2y ago
      One thing that puzzles me is those people who shudder at comparing Stalin's murderous spree with what Hitler's effects were. Is it the cognitive dissonance of not wanting to believe that we not only allied with a genocidal dictatorship but heavily supplied them with industrial output during the war? My family lived in the USSR and I can say for a fact - knowing it was the NKVD rather than Gestapo that might knock on the door in the middle of the night to disappear your father or uncle was of little consolation.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
This is the plot of flubber with Robin Williams…
simpaticoder 2y ago
Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.
- lrobinovitch 2y ago
  It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
  - escapecharacter 2y ago
    Of course, there is disagreement on a person’s roles and responsibilities. To someone, my responsibility might be answering the doorbell quickly when Amazon drops off a package. To another, it might be how responsive I am to email. These are in conflict, and sometimes it’s worth missing an Amazon package to finish an important email.
    - mandibeet 2y ago
      Absolutely, the concept of roles and responsibilities is highly subjective
  - simpaticoder 2y ago
    I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.
thih9 2y ago
The story about the wedding is one short paragraph at the end - with almost no extra information and not referenced elsewhere in the article. Very anticlimactic. > But the story in the book that I liked the most is this one: Zariski was, of course, very much obsessed with mathematics. On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.
apples5000 2y ago
I talked to one of Zariski's students about this... He mention to me that the article said he studied ”real” algebraic geometry, which is a different subject —he studied “complex” algebraic geometry as well as algebraic geometry without a limiting adjective.
galaxyLogic 2y ago
For whomever might be interested in anectodes about mathematicians' personal lives: My girlfriend's family was related to https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala and she told me this story which was part of the family lore. The family and friends were having some kind of get-together celebration maybe a wedding or so and prof. Vaisala's wife had bought him a brand new suit to look good for the occasion. During the party they were playing croquet in the garden and prof. Vaisala got really into the game, but had the realization that suit-pants may not be the best for playing croquet. He could have stuffed the end of his pant-legs into his socks but that didn't really work, maybe socks were too tight and pants too big. So, he found a pair of scissors somewhere, and cut his pant-legs short. His wife started crying. She didn't really appreciate the genius of mathematicians.
- mandibeet 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing this story! The story brought a smile on my face. Needed it today.
  - galaxyLogic 2y ago
    Thanks
- parpfish 2y ago
  Im always conflicted about stories like these. All of the mathematicians I’ve known ARE weird - really into technicalities and finding loopholes. But for some of them (particularly undergrad math majors)… I think the weirdness is a bit of an affectation that they adopt having heard so many stories about oddball geniuses. They fear that if they were able to behave and relate to normal people it proves that they lack the otherworldly genius they want to be know for. Let’s also normalize genius being normal people
  - galaxyLogic 2y ago
    Two physicists I think it was Bohr and Heisenberg were traveling on a train in Scotland together. Bohr looked out the train-window and said: Hey Heisenberg, look at those lambs! Heisenberg replied: What about them? Bohr: They are all black. Isn't that a big coincidence? Heisenberg: Yes. At least this side of them. I may have forgotten who this anecdote was really about, but is one story about how strange those guys can be. :-)
mandibeet 2y ago
These anecdotes not only humanize these brilliant minds but also offer a humorous and endearing look at the quirks that often accompany such intense intellectual focus.
rendall 2y ago
> On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife. Fellas and ladies, get yourself a spouse who understands when you're late to your own wedding because you are inspired by your passions.

194 points by boogiemath 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago

Nice little story, the bride was not upset. But a interesting read.

methuselah_in 2y ago

[flagged]

hprotagonist 2y ago

Reminds me of the story about Weiner, who forgot he moved. Apparently a true story, but the version where he also didn’t recognize his daughter (waiting for him at his previous home to show him to the new one) was an embellishment; at his funeral, his daughter said “dad never forgot who his children were”.

mandibeet 2y ago
I think such anecdotes and concepts reflect the complexity of human nature

blendergeek 2y ago

Headline should be "Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding" in accordance with HN headline guidelines.

thih9 2y ago
Could you cite the guideline? I couldn't find it; I thought the idea is to use the original title where possible. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
- bonoboTP 2y ago
  It's literal clickbait as you're moved to click to figure out who that man is.
  - nikolajan 2y ago
    This isn't clickbait in the slightest, this low level obsession with labeling anything that isn't entirely descriptive as clickbait is obnoxious. Not every article title has to be "A 500 word blog post on Oscar Zariski, covering years 1899-1960, published May 26th 3PM EST, by Boogie Math"
- blendergeek 2y ago
  Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding is the original title on the article. The title I objected to was "A man who forgot about his own wedding". This title was actually edited to make it more clickbaity before it was later edited to be less clickbaity.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- raldi 2y ago
  And in this case, it seems misleading and definitely clickbait. The quote at the end doesn't support the claim that he forgot anything. The citation (https://books.google.com/books?id=9zu0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=%22Oscar+Zariski%22+yole+wedding&source=bl&ots=T7Yl8KxkYJ&sig=ACfU3U1-kCFEEA3-wHh09ertpM7ZFRF-ow&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAz5ax6MeHAxU-6ckDHQudFPsQ6AF6BAgfEAM#v=onepage&q=%22Oscar%20Zariski%22%20yole%20wedding&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=9zu0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=P... ) doesn't support the claim either. It sounds more like the story was: While waiting for his wife to arrive at their wedding ceremony, he stepped away and passed the time by working on a problem.
dang 2y ago
This seems to be one of those non-converging title sequences because no option satisfies everyone. We eventually changed it to "Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry", even though this omits the anecdote which the thread is mostly about. People won't miss that if they see the article's own title though.

mpalmer 2y ago

I like the post, and I would upvote it if the title was more descriptive of the actual content instead of a clickbait-y "hook" that hints nothing about the topic. I thought I'd be reading about an interesting neuroscience case (or whatever), but it's a review/short synopsis of a mathematician's biography. The wedding anecdote is just the last paragraph.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

Historical footnote: 'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.' I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.

surfingdino 2y ago
She was likely seeing Hasidic Jews, who are quite distinct in the way they live and dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism
- akolbe 2y ago
  Hasidic teaching stories are charming. Here is one: When Rabbi Zusha was on his deathbed, his students found him in great distress. They tried to comfort him by telling him that he was almost as wise as Moses, so he was sure to be judged positively in Heaven. He replied, "When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses?' They will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?'"
YZF 2y ago
I would guess to some extent? I am far from an expert but I don't think late 19th century or early 20th century Europe would be directly comparable to 21st century USA. It's an interesting topic and maybe some starting points are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-population-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-pop... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl Part of my ancestry is European Jewish and I'm sure my grandparents and great grandparents would have stories to tell but I was never interested in this while they were still alive. Kind of funny how that works. They were not religious.

waynecochran 2y ago

I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people. That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.

ben_w 2y ago
Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
- jfengel 2y ago
  It kinda depends on how you measure. Basic quality of life went up fast, going from feudal agriculture to an industrial society. But then it stalled. And the process killed literally millions -- some from outright murder, some from overwhelming mismanagement. Many never wanted the Tsars gone to begin with; agricultural societies can be very conservative. And things had been slowly improving under the monarchy, under the same pressures that modernized western Europe in the mid 19th century. Historians cite a lot of mistakes by that last Tsar that could easily have gone the other way and saved the institution. He really screwed it up after a few generations of improvements. So... depends.
- waynecochran 2y ago
  One metric would be body count. 20th century Marxists are somewhere between 60 and 148 million dead. Hard to top that.
  - datameta 2y ago
    One thing that puzzles me is those people who shudder at comparing Stalin's murderous spree with what Hitler's effects were. Is it the cognitive dissonance of not wanting to believe that we not only allied with a genocidal dictatorship but heavily supplied them with industrial output during the war? My family lived in the USSR and I can say for a fact - knowing it was the NKVD rather than Gestapo that might knock on the door in the middle of the night to disappear your father or uncle was of little consolation.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

This is the plot of flubber with Robin Williams…

simpaticoder 2y ago

Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.

lrobinovitch 2y ago
It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
- escapecharacter 2y ago
  Of course, there is disagreement on a person’s roles and responsibilities. To someone, my responsibility might be answering the doorbell quickly when Amazon drops off a package. To another, it might be how responsive I am to email. These are in conflict, and sometimes it’s worth missing an Amazon package to finish an important email.
  - mandibeet 2y ago
    Absolutely, the concept of roles and responsibilities is highly subjective
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.

thih9 2y ago

The story about the wedding is one short paragraph at the end - with almost no extra information and not referenced elsewhere in the article. Very anticlimactic. > But the story in the book that I liked the most is this one: Zariski was, of course, very much obsessed with mathematics. On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.

apples5000 2y ago

I talked to one of Zariski's students about this... He mention to me that the article said he studied ”real” algebraic geometry, which is a different subject —he studied “complex” algebraic geometry as well as algebraic geometry without a limiting adjective.

galaxyLogic 2y ago

For whomever might be interested in anectodes about mathematicians' personal lives: My girlfriend's family was related to https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala and she told me this story which was part of the family lore. The family and friends were having some kind of get-together celebration maybe a wedding or so and prof. Vaisala's wife had bought him a brand new suit to look good for the occasion. During the party they were playing croquet in the garden and prof. Vaisala got really into the game, but had the realization that suit-pants may not be the best for playing croquet. He could have stuffed the end of his pant-legs into his socks but that didn't really work, maybe socks were too tight and pants too big. So, he found a pair of scissors somewhere, and cut his pant-legs short. His wife started crying. She didn't really appreciate the genius of mathematicians.

mandibeet 2y ago
Thank you for sharing this story! The story brought a smile on my face. Needed it today.
- galaxyLogic 2y ago
  Thanks
parpfish 2y ago
Im always conflicted about stories like these. All of the mathematicians I’ve known ARE weird - really into technicalities and finding loopholes. But for some of them (particularly undergrad math majors)… I think the weirdness is a bit of an affectation that they adopt having heard so many stories about oddball geniuses. They fear that if they were able to behave and relate to normal people it proves that they lack the otherworldly genius they want to be know for. Let’s also normalize genius being normal people
- galaxyLogic 2y ago
  Two physicists I think it was Bohr and Heisenberg were traveling on a train in Scotland together. Bohr looked out the train-window and said: Hey Heisenberg, look at those lambs! Heisenberg replied: What about them? Bohr: They are all black. Isn't that a big coincidence? Heisenberg: Yes. At least this side of them. I may have forgotten who this anecdote was really about, but is one story about how strange those guys can be. :-)

mandibeet 2y ago

These anecdotes not only humanize these brilliant minds but also offer a humorous and endearing look at the quirks that often accompany such intense intellectual focus.

rendall 2y ago

> On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife. Fellas and ladies, get yourself a spouse who understands when you're late to your own wedding because you are inspired by your passions.