From the reviews: "The author's book ...] saw its first edition in 1935. ...] Now as before, the original text of the book is an excellent source for an interested reader to study the methods of classical algebraic geometry, and to find the great old results. ...] a timelessly beautiful pearl in the cultural heritage of mathematics as a whole." Zentralblatt MATH

This second volume of our treatise on commutative algebra deals largely with three basic topics, which go beyond the more or less classical material of volume I and are on the whole of a more advanced nature and a more recent vintage. These topics are: (a) valuation theory; (b) theory of polynomial and power series rings (including generalizations to graded rings and modules); (c) local algebra. Because most of these topics have either their source or their best motivation in algebraic geom etry, the algebro-geometric connections and applications of the purely algebraic material are constantly stressed and abundantly scattered through out the exposition. Thus, this volume can be used in part as an introduc tion to some basic concepts and the arithmetic foundations of algebraic geometry. The reader who is not immediately concerned with geometric applications may omit the algebro-geometric material in a first reading (see" Instructions to the reader," page vii), but it is only fair to say that many a reader will find it more instructive to find out immediately what is the geometric motivation behind the purely algebraic material of this volume. The first 8 sections of Chapter VI (including 5bis) deal directly with properties of places, rather than with those of the valuation associated with a place. These, therefore, are properties of valuations in which the value group of the valuation is not involved."

From the Preface: "We have preferred to write a self-contained book which could be used in a basic graduate course of modern algebra. It is also with an eye to the student that we have tried to give full and detailed explanations in the proofs... We have also tried, this time with an eye to both the student and the mature mathematician, to give a many-sided treatment of our topics, not hesitating to offer several proofs of one and the same result when we thought that something might be learned, as to methods, from each of the proofs."

This is the second of four volumes that will eventually present the full corpus of Zariski's mathematical contributions. Like the first volume (subtitled Foundations of Algebraic Geometry and Resolution of Singularities and edited by H. Hironaka and D. Mumford), it is divided into two parts, each devoted to a large but circumscribed area of research activity. The first part, containing eight papers introduced by Artin, deals with the theory of formal holomorphic functions on algebraic varieties over fields of any characteristic. The primary concern, in Zariski's words, is "analytic properties of an algebraic variety V, either in the neighborhood of a point (strictly local theory) or - and this is the deeper aspect of the theory - in the neighborhood of an algebraic subvariety of V (semiglobal theory)." Mumford surveys the ten papers reprinted in the second part. These deal with linear systems and the Riemann-Roch theorem and its applications, again in arbitrary characteristic. The applications are primarily to algebraic surfaces and include minimal models and characterization of rational or ruled surfaces.

Oscar Zariski, one of the most eminent mathematicians of our time, climaxed a distinguished career by receiving the National Medal of Science. He has enriched mathematics, particularly in algebraic geometry and modern algebra, by numerous and fundamental papers. This volume is the first of four in which these papers are available in collected form.By introducing ideas from abstract algebra into algebraic geometry, Zariski undertook to rewrite its foundations completely, taking an approach that made no use whatsoever of topological or convergent power series methods and that made no appeal to vague geometric intuition. The most important characteristic of this approach toward algebraic geometry, and in particular toward the problem of resolution of singularities, is that it uses the available power of modern algebra as fully as possible not only as a source of techniques in each step of solving a specific problem but also in reformulating the problem at a fundamental level. Professor Hironaka writes, "By this type of fundamental approach (not to mention specific techniques he invented to overcome specific difficulties in the problem), he made it much easier for other mathematicians in later works to follow the tracks and make further progress."The present work contains 10 papers on foundations and 9 on the resolution of singularities that were first published between 1937 and 1967. In them, new methods are introduced that enabled Zariski to study algebraic geometry over arbitrary fields of coefficients. This broader outlook made it possible to solve certain classical problems using ideal theory and the theory of valuations that had long been regarded as too difficult to be handled.Among the basic problems whose solution is found in these papers are the local uniformization of all algebraic varieties, the reduction of singularities of 2- and 3-dimensional varieties, the introduction of the concept of normal variety which is now universally used, and the proof of "Zariski's Main Theorem.""Oscar Zariski: Collected Papers" is part of the series Mathematicians of Our Time, edited by Gian-Carlo Rota.