This invaluable book contains the collected papers of Prof Wei-Liang Chow, an original and versatile mathematician of the 20th Century. Prof Chow's name has become a household word in mathematics because of the Chow ring, Chow coordinates, and Chow's theorem on analytic sets in projective spaces. The Chow ring has many advantages and is widely used in intersection theory of algebraic geometry. Chow coordinates have been a very versatile tool in many aspects of algebraic geometry. Chow's theorem ? that a compact analytic variety in a projective space is algebraic ? is justly famous; it shows the close analogy between algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.About Professor Wei-Liang ChowThe long and distinguished career of Prof Wei-Liang Chow (1911-95) as a mathematician began in China with professorships at the National Central University in Nanking (1936-37) and the National Tung-Chi University in Shanghai (1946-47), and ultimately led him to the United States, where he joined the mathematics faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, first as an associate professor from 1948 to 1950, then as a full professor from 1950 until his retirement in 1977.In addition to serving as chairman of the mathematics department at Johns Hopkins from 1955 to 1965, he was Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Mathematics from 1953 to 1977.

Algebra, as a subdiscipline of mathematics, arguably has a history going back some 4000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. The history, however, of what is recognized today as high school algebra is much shorter, extending back to the sixteenth century, while the history of what practicing mathematicians call "modern algebra" is even shorter still. The present volume provides a glimpse into the complicated and often convoluted history of this latter conception of algebra by juxtaposing twelve episodes in the evolution of modern algebra from the early nineteenth-century work of Charles Babbage on functional equations to Alexandre Grothendieck's mid-twentieth-century metaphor of a ``rising sea'' in his categorical approach to algebraic geometry. In addition to considering the technical development of various aspects of algebraic thought, the historians of modern algebra whose work is united in this volume explore such themes as the changing aims and organization of the subject as well as the often complex lines of mathematical communication within and across national boundaries. Among the specific algebraic ideas considered are the concept of divisibility and the introduction of non-commutative algebras into the study of number theory and the emergence of algebraic geometry in the twentieth century. The resulting volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern mathematics in general and modern algebra in particular. It will be of particular interest to mathematicians and historians of mathematics.

Presents an outline of Alexander Grothendieck's theories. This book discusses four main themes - descent theory, Hilbert and Quot schemes, the formal existence theorem, and the Picard scheme. It is suitable for those working in algebraic geometry.

An introduction to abstract algebraic geometry, with the only prerequisites being results from commutative algebra, which are stated as needed, and some elementary topology. More than 400 exercises distributed throughout the book offer specific examples as well as more specialised topics not treated in the main text, while three appendices present brief accounts of some areas of current research. This book can thus be used as textbook for an introductory course in algebraic geometry following a basic graduate course in algebra. Robin Hartshorne studied algebraic geometry with Oscar Zariski and David Mumford at Harvard, and with J.-P. Serre and A. Grothendieck in Paris. He is the author of "Residues and Duality", "Foundations of Projective Geometry", "Ample Subvarieties of Algebraic Varieties", and numerous research titles.

From the reviews: "The author's book [...] saw its first edition in 1935. [...] Now as before, the original text of the book is an excellent source for an interested reader to study the methods of classical algebraic geometry, and to find the great old results. [...] a timelessly beautiful pearl in the cultural heritage of mathematics as a whole." Zentralblatt MATH

Elie Cartan's book Geometry of Riemannian Manifolds (1928) was one of the best introductions to his methods. It was based on lectures given by the author at the Sorbonne in the academic year 1925-26. A modernized and extensively augmented edition appeared in 1946 (2nd printing, 1951, and 3rd printing, 1988). Cartan's lectures in 1926-27 were different -- he introduced exterior forms at the very beginning and used extensively orthonormal frames throughout to investigate the geometry of Riemannian manifolds. In this course he solved a series of problems in Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces, as well as a series of variational problems on geodesics. The lectures were translated into Russian in the book Riemannian Geometry in an Orthogonal Frame (1960). This book has many innovations, such as the notion of intrinsic normal differentiation and the Gaussian torsion of a submanifold in a Euclidean multidimensional space or in a space of constant curvature, an affine connection defined in a normal fiber bundle of a submanifold, etc. The only book of Elie Cartan that was not available in English, it has now been translated into English by Vladislav V Goldberg, the editor of the Russian edition.