Beniamino Segre

Beniamino Segre (16 February 1903 – 2 October 1977) was an Italian mathematician, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. At the International Congress of Mathematicians, he was an invited speaker in 1928 in Bologna, in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 1958 in Edinburgh, as well as a plenary speaker in 1954 in Amsterdam.

Beniamino Segre (circa 1945)

Quotes

• A nonsingular cubic surface F can be rationally represented upon a plane α if and only if F contains a rational point.
  • (1945). "Arithmetic upon an algebraic surface". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 51 (2): 152–161. DOI:10.1090/s0002-9904-1945-08300-1. (quote from p. 159)

• The study of the geometry of a Galois space S_r,q, i. e. of a projective r-dimensional space over a Galois field of order q = p^h. where p, h are positive integers and p is a prime (the characteristic of the field), has recently been pursued and developed along new lines ... In it, both algebraic-geometric and arithmetical methods have been applied, including the use of electronic calculating machines; moreover, some of the problems dealt with are deeply connected with information theory, especially with the construction of q-ary error-correcting codes. It is actually a chapter of arithmetical geometry, which reduces to the investigation of certain questions on congruences mod p in the particular case when h = 1.
  • (1959). "On complete caps and ovaloids in three-dimensional Galois spaces of characteristic two". Acta Arithmetica 5 (3). (quote from p. 315)

• Non vi sarebbe quindi da stupirsi se le geometrie di Galois venissero and avere in futuro applicazioni anche al campo della fisica, da cui attualmente sembrano molto lontane esce anzi tali spazi finiti portassero alla costruzione di schemi a modelli dove i fenomeni fisici trovassero interpretazioni matematiche più semplici di quelle consuete. (It would not be much of a surprise if Galois geometry in the future came to have applications in the field of the physics, from which these finite geometries are currently far removed. These finite geometries might lead to the construction of models in which physical phenomena have simpler mathematical interpretations than the models now used. — modified from the original translation by Tallini)
  • as quoted in: "Beniamino Segre by G. Tallini". Combinatorics '81: In Honour of Beniamino Segre. Elsevier. 1 January 1983. pp. 5–12. ISBN 978-0-08-087189-9.  (quote from p. 10)

Quotes about Segre

• CUBIC varieties in four-space were first investigated by Segre, in two memoirs ... which are still classic, and in which he gave a generation of those having more than six nodes, especially the one with ten nodes, while he also considered varieties containing a plane, and gave some of their properties.
  • Solomon Lefschetz: (1912). "On the $V_{3}^{3}$ with five nodes of the second species in $S_{4}$". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 18 (8): 384–387. ISSN 0002-9904. DOI:10.1090/S0002-9904-1912-02232-2.