Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

Nice little story, the bride was not upset. But a interesting read.

Reminds me of the story about Weiner, who forgot he moved.

Apparently a true story, but the version where he also didn’t recognize his daughter (waiting for him at his previous home to show him to the new one) was an embellishment; at his funeral, his daughter said “dad never forgot who his children were”.

I like the post, and I would upvote it if the title was more descriptive of the actual content instead of a clickbait-y "hook" that hints nothing about the topic.

I thought I'd be reading about an interesting neuroscience case (or whatever), but it's a review/short synopsis of a mathematician's biography. The wedding anecdote is just the last paragraph.

Historical footnote:

'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.'

I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.

Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?