In memoriam of Wolf Barth (1942--2016) (Q1674551)

The paper under review is an obituary for the late Wolf Paul Barth by his prominent former students. It begins with a biography in Section 1. The main part of the article is devoted to a survey of Barth's principal results in Section 2, from the breakthrough results on the topology of subvarieties of \(\mathbb P^n\), now known as Barth-Lefschetz theorems, to his works on vector bundles (some of them in collaboration with A. van de Ven), motivated by Hartshorne's conjecture, and their moduli, to the classification of algebraic surfaces (some of them in collaboration with C. Peters) and finishing with the more recent results on the equations defining algebraic varieties and surfaces with many nodes. Finally, in Section 3, the authors illustrate the importance of Barth as a teacher, with examples from their own experience.