The Collected Papers of Wei-Liang Chow

Book excerpt: 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.