“A Superb Audience of One … André Weil” São Paulo 1945

In January 1945 Zariski left with Yole and Vera for an exchange professorship at the University of São Paulo with a suitcase full of rationed cigarettes, a going-away present from his students at Johns Hopkins. He later remembered that when the State Department had first approached him about going to Brazil, he had thought, “What would be the point in going to such a remote place?” But that when he had found out that André Weil would be joining the department in São Paulo at the same time, he had asked himself, “Why not?”

Weil, who had been invited by Dean Dreyfus of the Faculty of Sciences in São Paulo (whom he'd met through Claude Levi-Strauss), was also looking forward to closer contact with Zariski. In his introduction to Foundations of Algebraic Geometry he had written, “The attentive reader will also detect in many places the influence of O. Zariski's recent work; what he cannot easily imagine is how much benefit I have derived, during the whole period of preparation of this book, from personal contacts both with Zariski and with Chevalley, from their freely given advice and suggestions, and from access to their unpublished manuscripts.”⁷⁹