Ivan Cheltsov – författare

This book collects the proceedings of a series of conferences dedicated to birational geometry of Fano varieties held in Moscow, Shanghai and Pohang

The conferences were focused on the following two related problems:

•  existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics on Fano varieties

•  degenerations of Fano varieties

on which two famous conjectures were recently proved. The first is the famous Borisov–Alexeev–Borisov Conjecture on the boundedness of Fano varieties, proved by Caucher Birkar (for which he was awarded the Fields medal in 2018), and the second one is the (arguably even more famous) Tian–Yau–Donaldson Conjecture on the existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics on (smooth) Fano varieties and K-stability, which was proved by Xiuxiong Chen, Sir Simon Donaldson and Song Sun. The solutions for these longstanding conjectures have opened new directions in birational and Kähler geometries. These research directions generated new interesting mathematical problems, attracting the attention of mathematicians worldwide.

These conferences brought together top researchers in both fields (birational geometry and complex geometry) to solve some of these problems and understand the relations between them. The result of this activity is collected in this book, which contains contributions by sixty nine mathematicians, who contributed forty three research and survey papers to this volume. Many of them were participants of the Moscow–Shanghai–Pohang conferences, while the others helped to expand the research breadth of the volume—the diversity of their contributions reflects the vitality of modern Algebraic Geometry.

The main focus of this volume is on the problem of describing the automorphism groups of affine and projective varieties, a classical subject in algebraic geometry where, in both cases, the automorphism group is often infinite dimensional. The collection covers a wide range of topics and is intended for researchers in the fields of classical algebraic geometry and birational geometry (Cremona groups) as well as affine geometry with an emphasis on algebraic group actions and automorphism groups. It presents original research and surveys and provides a valuable overview of the current state of the art in these topics.

Bringing together specialists from projective, birational algebraic geometry and affine and complex algebraic geometry, including Mori theory and algebraic group actions, this book is the result of ensuing talks and discussions from the conference “Groups of Automorphisms in Birational and Affine Geometry” held in October 2012, at the CIRM, Levico Terme, Italy. The talks at the conference highlighted the close connections between the above-mentioned areas and promoted the exchange of knowledge and methods from adjacent fields.