Wolf Barth (1942--2016)

In this article we describe the life and work of Wolf Barth who died on 30th December 2016. Wolf Barth's contributions to algebraic variety span a wide range of subjects. His achievements range from what is now called the Barth-Lefschetz theorems to his fundamental contributions to the theory of algebraic surfaces and moduli of vector bundles, and include his later work on algebraic surfaces with many singularities, culminating in the famous Barth sextic.Comment: accepted for publication in Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, obituary, 17 pages, 2 figures, 1 phot

Against the Stream, How Karl Barth Reframed Church-State Relations (Chapter 3 of Keine Gewalt! No Violence!)

Excerpt: Defenders of the Barmen Declaration\u27s apolitical tone remind us that it was never intended to establish a program of political protest, that Karl Barth and the others were pastors not politicians; that the goal was to reassert the integrity of the gospel in the face of the attempted subversion by the German Christians. On the one hand, the soundness of this interpretation is self-evident. And yet it should surprise no one that an apolitical strategy would have little political impact on the German state. It is also true that Barth\u27s views on church and state relations changed after Barmen; that afterward he expressed remorse over his own sins of omission. If we explore Barth\u27s writings over a twenty-year period, the change will become evident and so also his impact on the emerging political theology in Eastern Europe. The next two chapters will chronicle this development

Book Review: Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth and Vedanta Desika, John N. Sheveland

A review of John N. Sheveland\u27s Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth and Vedanta Desika by Reid B. Locklin

Thomas Torrance\u27s Reformulation of Karl Barth\u27s Christological Rejection of Natural Theology

Karl Barth is widely noted for his antipathy to all forms of natural theology. Indeed, the results of Barth’s Christocentricity have made his name synonymous with the negation of all divine revelation apart from Christ, the one Word of God. if this is so, then the theology of Thomas Torrance, as a highly significant development of Barth’s thought and as vitally concerned with proper natural theology (in dialogue with the physical sciences), becomes a questionable enterprise. This article examines this question and concludes that, while Torrance clearly goes beyond Barth, he is faithful to subthemes in Barth’s theology relating to ‘natural theology’, making explicit and bringing to prominence streams of Barthian thought often left unnoticed

Heisenberg-invariant Kummer surfaces

We study the geometry of Nieto's quintic threefold (Barth & Nieto, J. Alg. Geom. 3, 1994) and the Kummer and abelian surfaces that correspond to special loci.Comment: Plain TeX, 17 pages. Final version, with minor corrections, to appear in Proc. Edinburgh Math. So