Projective surfaces of small class (Q685206)

A lot of work, both classical and modern, has been done in order to classify embedded projective varieties with small invariants, and more specifically with small degree and/or sectional genus. Another classical projective invariant that has not been much considered is the class. Recall that the class of a projective variety is the degree of its dual variety (if the latter is a hypersurface). In the paper under review, the authors classify smooth projective surfaces with class \(\mu \leq 25\), as well as those with \(\mu - d \leq 16\), \(d\) being the degree. The key tool for this classification is to use Landman's formula \(\mu - d = 4(g-q) + b_ 2-2\) (here \(g\) is the sectional genus, \(q\) is the irregularity and \(b_ 2\) the second Betti number). This formula provides that \(g\) must be small enough to use known classifications of varieties with small sectional genus. Similarly, the authors classify varieties of dimension \(k \geq 3\) with \(\mu \leq 23\).