This book presents fundamentals from the theory of algebraic surfaces, including areas such as rational singularities of surfaces and their relation with Grothendieck duality theory, numerical criteria for contractibility of curves on an algebraic surface, and the problem of minimal models of surfaces. In fact, the classification of surfaces is the main scope of this book and the author presents the approach developed by Mumford and Bombieri. Chapters also cover the Zariski decomposition of effective divisors and graded algebras.

Developed over more than a century, and still an active area of research today, the classification of algebraic surfaces is an intricate and fascinating branch of mathematics. In this book Professor BeauviIle gives a lucid and concise account of the subject, following the strategy of F. Enriques, but expressed simply in the language of modern topology and sheaf theory, so as to be accessible to any budding geometer. This volume is self contained and the exercises succeed both in giving the flavour of the extraordinary wealth of examples in the classical subject, and in equipping the reader with most of the techniques needed for research.

From the reviews: "The author's book [...] saw its first edition in 1935. [...] Now as before, the original text of the book is an excellent source for an interested reader to study the methods of classical algebraic geometry, and to find the great old results. [...] a timelessly beautiful pearl in the cultural heritage of mathematics as a whole." Zentralblatt MATH

A novel feature of the book is its integrated approach to algebraic surface theory and the study of vector bundle theory on both curves and surfaces. While the two subjects remain separate through the first few chapters, they become much more tightly interconnected as the book progresses. Thus vector bundles over curves are studied to understand ruled surfaces, and then reappear in the proof of Bogomolov's inequality for stable bundles, which is itself applied to study canonical embeddings of surfaces via Reider's method. Similarly, ruled and elliptic surfaces are discussed in detail, before the geometry of vector bundles over such surfaces is analysed. Many of the results on vector bundles appear for the first time in book form, backed by many examples, both of surfaces and vector bundles, and over 100 exercises forming an integral part of the text. Aimed at graduates with a thorough first-year course in algebraic geometry, as well as more advanced students and researchers in the areas of algebraic geometry, gauge theory, or 4-manifold topology, many of the results on vector bundles will also be of interest to physicists studying string theory.

In this book, Miranda takes the approach that algebraic curves are best encountered for the first time over the complex numbers, where the reader's classical intuition about surfaces, integration, and other concepts can be brought into play. Therefore, many examples of algebraic curves are presented in the first chapters. In this way, the book begins as a primer on Riemann surfaces, with complex charts and meromorphic functions taking centre stage. But the main examples come fromprojective curves, and slowly but surely the text moves toward the algebraic category. Proofs of the Riemann-Roch and Serre Dualtiy Theorems are presented in an algebraic manner, via an adaptation of the adelic proof, expressed completely in terms of solving a Mittag-Leffler problem. Sheaves andcohomology are introduced as a unifying device in the later chapters, so that their utility and naturalness are immediately obvious. Requiring a background of one term of complex variable theory and a year of abstract algebra, this is an excellent graduate textbook for a second-term course in complex variables or a year-long course in algebraic geometry.

These lectures, delivered by Professor Mumford at Harvard in 1963-1964, are devoted to a study of properties of families of algebraic curves, on a non-singular projective algebraic curve defined over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic. The methods and techniques of Grothendieck, which have so changed the character of algebraic geometry in recent years, are used systematically throughout. Thus the classical material is presented from a new viewpoint.

In the 19 years which passed since the first edition was published, several important developments have taken place in the theory of surfaces. The most sensational one concerns the differentiable structure of surfaces. Twenty years ago very little was known about differentiable structures on 4-manifolds, but in the meantime Donaldson on the one hand and Seiberg and Witten on the other hand, have found, inspired by gauge theory, totally new invariants. Strikingly, together with the theory explained in this book these invariants yield a wealth of new results about the differentiable structure of algebraic surfaces. Other developments include the systematic use of nef-divisors (in ac cordance with the progress made in the classification of higher dimensional algebraic varieties), a better understanding of Kahler structures on surfaces, and Reider's new approach to adjoint mappings. All these developments have been incorporated in the present edition, though the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten theory only by way of examples. Of course we use the opportunity to correct some minor mistakes, which we ether have discovered ourselves or which were communicated to us by careful readers to whom we are much obliged.

In this monograph, we de?ne and investigate an algebro-geometric analogue of Donaldson invariants by using moduli spaces of semistable sheaves with arbitrary ranks on a polarized projective surface. We may expect the existence of interesting “universal relations among invariants”, which would be a natural generalization of the “wall-crossing formula” and the “Witten conjecture” for classical Donaldson invariants. Our goal is to obtain a weaker version of such relations, in other brief words, to describe a relation as the sum of integrals over the products of m- uli spaces of objects with lower ranks. Fortunately, according to a recent excellent work of L. Gottsche, ̈ H. Nakajima and K. Yoshioka, [53], a wall-crossing formula for Donaldson invariants of projective surfaces can be deduced from such a weaker result in the rank two case. We hope that our work in this monograph would, at least tentatively, provides a part of foundation for the further study on such universal relations. In the rest of this preface, we would like to explain our motivation and some of important ingredients of this study. See Introduction for our actual problems and results. Donaldson Invariants Let us brie?y recall Donaldson invariants. We refer to [22] for more details and precise. We also refer to [37], [39], [51] and [53]. LetX be a compact simply con- ? nected oriented real 4-dimensional C -manifold with a Riemannian metric g. Let P be a principalSO(3)-bundle on X.

A novel feature of the book is its integrated approach to algebraic surface theory and the study of vector bundle theory on both curves and surfaces. While the two subjects remain separate through the first few chapters, they become much more tightly interconnected as the book progresses. Thus vector bundles over curves are studied to understand ruled surfaces, and then reappear in the proof of Bogomolov's inequality for stable bundles, which is itself applied to study canonical embeddings of surfaces via Reider's method. Similarly, ruled and elliptic surfaces are discussed in detail, before the geometry of vector bundles over such surfaces is analysed. Many of the results on vector bundles appear for the first time in book form, backed by many examples, both of surfaces and vector bundles, and over 100 exercises forming an integral part of the text. Aimed at graduates with a thorough first-year course in algebraic geometry, as well as more advanced students and researchers in the areas of algebraic geometry, gauge theory, or 4-manifold topology, many of the results on vector bundles will also be of interest to physicists studying string theory.

Algebraic geometry has benefited enormously from the powerful general machinery developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The cost has been that much of the research of previous generations is in a language unintelligible to modern workers, in particular, the rich legacy of classical algebraic geometry, such as plane algebraic curves of low degree, special algebraic surfaces, theta functions, Cremona transformations, the theory of apolarity and the geometry of lines in projective spaces. The author's contemporary approach makes this legacy accessible to modern algebraic geometers and to others who are interested in applying classical results. The vast bibliography of over 600 references is complemented by an array of exercises that extend or exemplify results given in the book.