Constantin Shramov - Böcker

Algebraic varieties are shapes defined by polynomial equations. Smooth Fano threefolds are a fundamental subclass that can be thought of as higher-dimensional generalizations of ordinary spheres. They belong to 105 irreducible deformation families. This book determines whether the general element of each family admits a Kähler-Einstein metric (and for many families, for all elements), addressing a question going back to Calabi 70 years ago. The book's solution exploits the relation between these metrics and the algebraic notion of K-stability. Moreover, the book presents many different techniques to prove the existence of a Kähler-Einstein metric, containing many additional relevant results such as the classification of all Kähler-Einstein smooth Fano threefolds with infinite automorphism groups and computations of delta-invariants of all smooth del Pezzo surfaces. This book will be essential reading for researchers and graduate students working on algebraic geometry and complex geometry.

This book is devoted to arithmetic geometry with special attention given to the unramified Brauer group of algebraic varieties and its most striking applications in birational and Diophantine geometry. The topics include Galois cohomology, Brauer groups, obstructions to stable rationality, Weil restriction of scalars, algebraic tori, the Hasse principle, Brauer-Manin obstruction, and etale cohomology. The book contains a detailed presentation of an example of a stably rational but not rational variety, which is presented as series of exercises with detailed hints. This approach is aimed to help the reader understand crucial ideas without being lost in technical details. The reader will end up with a good working knowledge of the Brauer group and its important geometric applications, including the construction of unirational but not stably rational algebraic varieties, a subject which has become fashionable again in connection with the recent breakthroughs by a number of mathematicians.

Cremona Groups and the Icosahedron focuses on the Cremona groups of ranks 2 and 3 and describes the beautiful appearances of the icosahedral group A5 in them. The book surveys known facts about surfaces with an action of A5, explores A5-equivariant geometry of the quintic del Pezzo threefold V5, and gives a proof of its A5-birational rigidity.The authors explicitly describe many interesting A5-invariant subvarieties of V5, including A5-orbits, low-degree curves, invariant anticanonical K3 surfaces, and a mildly singular surface of general type that is a degree five cover of the diagonal Clebsch cubic surface. They also present two birational selfmaps of V5 that commute with A5-action and use them to determine the whole group of A5-birational automorphisms. As a result of this study, they produce three non-conjugate icosahedral subgroups in the Cremona group of rank 3, one of them arising from the threefold V5.This book presents up-to-date tools for studying birational geometry of higher-dimensional varieties. In particular, it provides readers with a deep understanding of the biregular and birational geometry of V5.