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AMS Presidents
Oscar Zariski

40. Oscar Zariski

President 1969–1970

Doctor of Mathematics, University of Rome, Italy, 1924

Zariski was forced to move several times in his life due to political forces–from Belarus to the Ukraine, to Italy, and finally to the U.S. in 1927. His principal academic appointments were at Johns Hopkins University (1927-1945) and at Harvard University (1947 until his retirement in 1969). He was awarded the AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra in 1944 for papers on algebraic varieties; the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1965; the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 1981 for his work in algebraic geometry, especially his fundamental contributions to the algebraic foundations of this subject; and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1981. Zariski was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

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