The
Category-Cafe ran an interesting post The history of n-categories
claiming that “mathematicians’ histories are largely
‘Royal-road-to-me’ accounts”
To my mind a key
difference is the historians’ emphasis in their histories that things
could have turned out very differently, while the mathematicians tend to
tell a story where we learn how the present has emerged out of the past,
giving the impression that things were always going to turn out not very
dissimilarly to the way they have, even if in retrospect the course was
quite tortuous.
Over the last weeks I’ve been writing up
the notes of a course on ‘Elementary Algebraic Geometry’ that I’ll
be teaching this year in Bach3. These notes are split into three
historical periods more or less corresponding to major conceptual leaps
in the subject : (1890-1920) ideals in polynomial rings (1920-1950)
intrinsic definitions using the coordinate ring (1950-1970) scheme
theory. Whereas it is clear to take Hilbert&Noether as the leading
figures of the first period and Serre&Grothendieck as those of the
last, the situation for the middle period is less clear to me. At
first I went for the widely accepted story, as for example phrased by Miles Reid in the
Final Comments to his Undergraduate Algebraic Geometry course.
…
rigorous foundations for algebraic geometry were laid in the 1920s and
1930s by van der Waerden, Zariski and Weil (van der Waerden’s
contribution is often suppressed, apparently because a number of
mathematicians of the immediate post-war period, including some of the
leading algebraic geometers, considered him a Nazi collaborator).
But then I read The Rising Sea: Grothendieck
on simplicity and generality I by Colin McLarty and stumbled upon
the following paragraph
From Emmy Noether’s viewpoint,
then, it was natural to look at prime ideals instead of classical and
generic pointsโรรฎor, as we would more likely say today, to identify
points with prime ideals. Her associate Wolfgang Krull did this. He gave
a lecture in Paris before the Second World War on algebraic geometry
taking all prime ideals as points, and using a Zariski topology (for
which see any current textbook on algebraic geometry). He did this over
any ring, not only polynomial rings like C[x, y]. The generality was
obvious from the Noether viewpoint, since all the properties needed for
the definition are common to all rings. The expert audience laughed at
him and he abandoned the idea.
The story seems to be
due to Jurgen Neukirch’s ‘Erinnerungen an Wolfgang Krull’
published in ‘Wolfgang Krull : Gesammelte Abhandlungen’ (P.
Ribenboim, editor) but as our library does not have this book I would
welcome any additional information such as : when did Krull give this
talk in Paris? what was its precise content? did he introduce the prime
spectrum in it? and related to this : when and where did Zariski
introduce ‘his’ topology? Answers anyone?