János Kollár – författare

A pioneering new nonlinear approach to a fundamental question in algebraic geometryOne of the crowning achievements of nineteenth-century mathematics was the proof that the geometry of lines in space uniquely determines the Cartesian coordinates, up to a linear ambiguity. What Determines an Algebraic Variety? develops a nonlinear version of this theory, offering the first nonlinear generalization of the seminal work of Veblen and Young in a century. While the book uses cutting-edge techniques, the statements of its theorems would have been understandable a century ago; despite this, the results are totally unexpected. Putting geometry first in algebraic geometry, the book provides a new perspective on a classical theorem of fundamental importance to a wide range of fields in mathematics.Starting with basic observations, the book shows how to read off various properties of a variety from its geometry. The results get stronger as the dimension increases. The main result then says that a normal projective variety of dimension at least 4 over a field of characteristic 0 is completely determined by its Zariski topological space. There are many open questions in dimensions 2 and 3, and in positive characteristic.

Resolution of singularities is a powerful and frequently used tool in algebraic geometry. In this book, János Kollár provides a comprehensive treatment of the characteristic 0 case. He describes more than a dozen proofs for curves, many based on the original papers of Newton, Riemann, and Noether. Kollár goes back to the original sources and presents them in a modern context. He addresses three methods for surfaces, and gives a self-contained and entirely elementary proof of a strong and functorial resolution in all dimensions. Based on a series of lectures at Princeton University and written in an informal yet lucid style, this book is aimed at readers who are interested in both the historical roots of the modern methods and in a simple and transparent proof of this important theorem.

Exploring the connections between arithmetic and geometric properties of algebraic varieties has been the object of much fruitful study for a long time, especially in the case of curves. The aim of the Summer School and Conference on "Higher Dimensional Varieties and Rational Points" held in Budapest, Hungary during September 2001 was to bring together students and experts from the arithmetic and geometric sides of algebraic geometry in order to get a better understanding of the current problems, interactions and advances in higher dimension. The lecture series and conference lectures assembled in this volume give a comprehensive introduction to students and researchers in algebraic geometry and in related fields to the main ideas of this rapidly developing area.