Interview with Ragni Piene

Abstract

Ulf Persson received his PhD at Harvard in the Spring of 1975 under David Mumford. His dissertation was entitled 'Degenerations of Algebraic Surfaces'. Persson's professional publications have been almost exclusively in algebraic geometry and especially on surfaces. He is inordinately proud of having introduced the notion of the 'geography of surfaces', where the notion of 'geography' has caught on in other contexts. Persson has been based in Sweden since 1979 but did many stints as a visitor to a variety of American universities during the 1980s. In recent years, his activities have widened. He founded the Newsletter of the Swedish Mathematical Society during his presidentship and has been its main editor for most of the time since then. He has also been an editor of the EMS Newsletter. He is fond of conducting somewhat idiosyncratic interviews with mathematicians, some of them appearing in this newsletter but the more extreme appearing in the Newsletter of the Swedish Mathematical Society. As is not unusual for people who are aging, he has picked up his youthful interest in philosophy and has published a book and an article on Popper.