Tells the story of a philosophy of J P Serre and his vision of relating that philosophy to problems in affine algebraic geometry. This book gives a presentation... » 

Tells the story of a philosophy of J P Serre and his vision of relating that philosophy to problems in affine algebraic geometry. This book gives a presentation of the Quillen-Suslin theorem settling Serre's conjecture. The central topic is the question of whether a curve in space is as a set an intersection of hypersurfaces. «