The papers of Gaetano Scorza on group theory (Q1175682)

In his lifetime G. Scorza (1876-1939) published eight papers on group theory. A treatise on abstract groups, he left incomplete, appeared posthumously in 1942, edited by his son Giuseppe and the author of this paper. According to the latter, even though Scorza's most important works concerned algebraic geometry and the theory of algebras, nonetheless those eight papers deserve consideration for they contain remarkable contributions to group theory and pioneering ideas as well. The first one, having appeared in 1926, dealt for the first time with the problem of the covering of a group. In a subsequent paper Scorza generalized Chapman's theorem on the cosets in a finite group. Then he devoted three papers on the theory of fundamental subgroups of a finite group, worked out by M. Cipolla from 1909 on. The remaining papers concern the theory of group representations and group algebras. In this interesting paper the author gives a detailed account of the results obtained by Scorza and adds some hints on the further developments related to Scorza's ideas.