Chow Ring - History

History

The rational equivalence and the ring A* was defined by the Italian school of the algebraic geometry in the early 20th century and was used by Severi and his school. (See, for example, Severi's papers, where Severi essentially studies the group A₀(S) for an algebraic surface S, and remarks in the beginning of the Mumford's paper. Segre uses a subtle study of the group A₀ of a singular curve in his 1930 paper to describe branch curves of algebraic surfaces in P2. The ring A* was called Chow ring after W.-L. Chow wrote an important review in 1956 . Some geometers hold to the opinion that the term "Chow ring" for the ring of algebraic cycles modulo rational equivalence was offered by Grothendieck.