Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Resolution of singularities
Summary
In algebraic geometry, the problem of resolution of singularities asks whether every algebraic variety V has a resolution, a non-singular variety W with a proper birational map W→V. For varieties over fields of characteristic 0 this was proved in Hironaka (1964), while for varieties over fields of characteristic p it is an open problem in dimensions at least 4.
Originally the problem of resolution of singularities was to find a nonsingular model for the function field of a variety X, in other words a complete non-singular variety X′ with the same function field. In practice it is more convenient to ask for a different condition as follows: a variety X has a resolution of singularities if we can find a non-singular variety X′ and a proper birational map from X′ to X. The condition that the map is proper is needed to exclude trivial solutions, such as taking X′ to be the subvariety of non-singular points of X.
More generally, it is often useful to resolve the singularities of a variety X embedded into a larger variety W. Suppose we have a closed embedding of X into a regular variety W. A strong desingularization of X is given by a proper birational morphism from a regular variety W′ to W subject to some of the following conditions (the exact choice of conditions depends on the author):
The strict transform X′ of X is regular, and transverse to the exceptional locus of the resolution morphism (so in particular it resolves the singularities of X).
The map from the strict transform of X to X is an isomorphism away from the singular points of X.
W′ is constructed by repeatedly blowing up regular closed subvarieties of W or more strongly regular subvarieties of X, transverse to the exceptional locus of the previous blowings up.
The construction of W′ is functorial for smooth morphisms to W and embeddings of W into a larger variety. (It cannot be made functorial for all (not necessarily smooth) morphisms in any reasonable way.)
The morphism from X′ to X does not depend on the embedding of X in W.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.