A Superficial Working Guide to Deformations and Moduli

This is the first part of a guide to deformations and moduli, especially viewed from the perspective of algebraic surfaces (the simplest higher dimensional varieties). It contains also new results, regarding the question of local homeomorphism between Kuranishi and Teichmueller space, and a survey of new results with Ingrid Bauer, concerning the discrepancy between the deformation of the action of a group G on a minimal models S, respectively the deformation of the action of G on the canonical model X. Here Def(S) maps properly onto Def(X), but the same does not hold for pairs: Def(S,G) does not map properly onto Def(X,G). Indeed the connected components of Def(S), in the case of tertiary Burniat surfaces, only map to locally closed sets. The last section contains anew result on some surfaces whise Albanese map has generic degree equal to 2.Comment: 56 pages, revision to appear in the Handbook of Moduli, in honour of David Mumford, to be published by International press, editors Gavril Farkas and Ian Morrison. The former theorem 29 on moduli spaces for minimal surfaces has been correcte

Notes on a paper of Mess

These notes are a companion to the article "Lorentz spacetimes of constant curvature" by Geoffrey Mess, which was first written in 1990 but never published. Mess' paper will appear together with these notes in a forthcoming issue of Geometriae Dedicata.Comment: 26 page

The structure of algebraic varieties

ICM lecture on minimal models and moduli of varieties