学习代数几何的四条途径.docVIP

学习代数几何的四条途径 ?????????????????????????????????????? In educating mathematicians about a new area, it is worthwhile to distinguish between the courtship period and what comes after. Some books are written to make you fall in love with a subject; others are written to tell you what you need to know in order to live with it. ? I vividly remember how I fell in love with algebraic geometry. I was a first-year graduate student at Princeton, heading for winter vacation. Thus far at Princeton, I had seen some lovely but quite abstract mathematics, but some good soul put a copy of Robert J. Walkers Algebraic Curves [10], a little Dover paperback, into my hands just before I left. When I reached Noethers theorem and its applications to the proof of Pascals theorem and the group law for a plane cubic, something indefinable happened to me-admittedly, I was on a beach in the Virgin Islands, which may have had an effect-and somewhere in my brain the feeling that every author hopes to evoke was aroused: I want to know more. ?Algebraic geometry is not an easy subject either to teach or to learn. A list of worthwhile topics to know before undertaking the study of algebraic geometry could include commutative algebra, complex analysis, algebraic and differential topology, number theory, elliptic operator theory, K-theory, differential geometry, category theory, Lie groups and representation theory, several complex variables, and lattice polyhedra, with the recent essential addition of elementary particle theory. At the time, I had a decent understanding of perhaps two of these. Where to start? I did not know it then, but the issue of how to help students get started learning algebraic geometry is a question that almost every practicing algebraic geometer would answer differently. Furthermore, at that time, books had not yet been written for many of the paths to algebraic geometry that are commonly trodden now. With the benefit of hindsight, I would distinguish four basic approaches