No label defined (Q4400616)

The paper traces the development of the Italian school of geometry to German geometers from the relations of Betti with Riemann to the reception of the Brill-Noether algebraic geometry of surfaces by Segre and his students Castelnuovo and Enriques and Klein's group theoretical approach by Fano. Enriques started contacts with the French school of transcendental methods of algebraic surface theory developed by Picard and his students. The development of these contacts is elucidated by extensive quotations from the correspondence between Enriques (at Bologna) and Castelnuovo (in Rome) spanning the period of 1894-1903. It is pointed out that a great opportunity for algebraic geometry was lost at the Paris International Congress of 1900 which was attended neither by French, nor by German, nor by Italian leading geometers. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0890.00038].