Abelian variety
projective abelian algebraic group
In mathematics, particularly in algebraic geometry, complex analysis and algebraic number theory, an abelian variety is a smooth projective algebraic variety that is also an algebraic group, i.e., has a group law that can be defined by regular functions. Abelian varieties are at the same time among the most studied objects in algebraic geometry and indispensable tools for research on other topics in algebraic geometry and number theory.
An abelian variety can be defined by equations having coefficients in any field; the variety is then said to be defined over that field. Historically the first abelian varieties to be studied were those defined over the field of complex numbers. Such abelian varieties turn out to be exactly those complex tori that can be holomorphically embedded into a complex projective space.
Abelian varieties defined over algebraic number fields are a special case, which is important also from the viewpoint of number theory. Localization techniques lead naturally from abelian varieties defined over number fields to ones defined over finite fields and various local fields. Since a number field is the fraction field of a Dedekind domain, for any nonzero prime of your Dedekind domain, there is a map from the Dedekind domain to the quotient of the Dedekind domain by the prime, which is a finite field for all finite primes. This induces a map from the fraction field to any such finite field. Given a curve with equation defined over the number field, we can apply this map to the coefficients to get a curve defined over some finite field, where the choices of finite field correspond to the finite primes of the number field.
The public source identifies “Abelian variety” as projective abelian algebraic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Abelian, variety and projective.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abelian variety” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.