Abstract:
The names of Max Noether, Alfred Clebsch, Paul Gordan, Hieronium Zeuthen and Italians: Guido Castelnuovo, Federico Enriques and Francesco Severi are best known for their results in the theory of algebraic surfaces in late 19th and early 20th ‒ arithmetic, geometric and linear genera, other invariants and relations among them, Noether's and Castelnuovo's inequalities...
But in the early 20th century a young Polish mathematician from Kraków published papers in the theory of algebraic surfaces which inspired those distinguished scholars from Italian School of algebraic geometry. His name is Alfred Rosenblatt (1880‒1947). Who was he?
Rosenblatt studied mathematics and its applications in Kraków (1902‒1904 and 1905‒1907) and Göttingen (1908‒1909). He obtained PhD and habilitation (thesis: Sur certaines classes de surfaces algébriques irrégulières et sur les transformations birationnelles de ces surfaces en elles-memes, Bull. Internat. Acad. Cracovie Cl. Sci. Math. Natur. Ser. A Sci. Math. 1912, p. 761‒810, in mathematics from the Jagiellonian University but he never got a Chair in Kraków.
In 1936 he moved to Lima, Peru. He obtained the Chair of Astronomy and Geodesy at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Rosenblatt published about 300 papers in many various fields of pure and applied mathematics: geometry, algebraic geometry, number theory, theory of analytic functions, ordinary and partial differential equations, probability, topology, mathematical physics, celestial mechanics, three body problem, hydrodynamics, fluid mechanics, lubrication theory, aerodynamics, optics, seismic, genetics, cosmology and history of exact sciences. Rosenblatt actively participated in four International Congresses of Mathematicians, where he presented two invited talks and two short talks (Bologna and Zürich). He and his contribution to mathematics remain almost unknown for the general mathematical audience in Europe.
