Friedrich Hirzebruch

In many different ways, 1953 was an exciting year. In February–March, at the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge, England, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA molecules and its double-helix geometry. This discovery was announced in...

When Friedrich Hirzebruch was a Member in the School of Mathematics in 1954, his paper, "Some problems on differentiable and complex manifolds", was published in the Annals of Mathematics. In it he asked whether Chern numbers in albegraic geometry...