of Weil's at São Paulo just after World War II, always insisted that generic points should be unique. (This can be put back into topologists' terms: Weil's idea fails to give a Kolmogorov space and Zariski thinks in terms of the Kolmogorov quotient.) In the rapid foundational changes of the 1950s Weil's approach became obsolete. In scheme theory, though, from 1957, generic points returned: this time à la Zariski. For example for R a discrete valuation ring, Spec(R) consists of two points, a generic point (coming from the prime ideal {0}) and a closed point or special point coming from the unique maximal ideal. For morphisms to Spec(R), the fiber above the special point is the special fiber, an important concept for example in reduction modulo p, monodromy theory and other theories about degeneration. The generic fiber, equally, is the fiber above the generic point. Geometry of degeneration is largely then about the passage from generic to special fibers, or in other words how specialization of parameters affects matters. (For a discrete valuation ring the topological space in question is the Sierpinski space of topologists. Other local rings have unique generic and special points, but a more complicated spectrum, since they represent general dimensions. The discrete valuation case is much like the complex unit disk, for these purposes.) References Algebraic geometry General topology