Fano

Gino Fano

Born: 5 Jan 1871 in Mantua, Italy
Died: 8 Nov 1952 in Verona, Italy

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Gino Fano studied at Turin under Collado Segre and met Castelnuovo there. Then he went to Göttingen where he met Klein. Fano became Castelnuovo's assistant, then was professor at Turin until he was deprived of his chair by the Fascist Regime in 1938. Fano then went to Switzerland and, after 1946, he taught in the USA and Italy.

His work was mainly on projective and algebraic geometry. Fano was a pioneer in finite geometry and one of the first people to try to set geometry on an abstract footing. Before Hilbert was to make such abstract statements Fano said

As basis for our study we assume an arbitrary collection of entities of an arbitrary nature, entities which, for brevity, we shall call points, and this quite independently of their nature.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. A Terracini, Gino Fano, Bollettino dell'Unione matematica italiana 7 (1952), 485-490. 
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