# Tag Info

## About birational-geometry

Birational geometry is a field of algebraic geometry the goal of which is to determine when two algebraic varieties are isomorphic outside lower-dimensional subsets. This amounts to studying mappings that are given by rational functions rather than polynomials; the map may fail to be defined where the rational functions have poles.

A rational map from one variety (understood to be irreducible) X to another variety Y, written as a dashed arrow X – → Y, is defined as a morphism from a nonempty open subset U of X to Y. By definition of the Zariski topology used in algebraic geometry, a nonempty open subset U is always the complement of a lower-dimensional subset of X. Concretely, a rational map can be written in coordinates using rational functions.

A birational map from X to Y is a rational map f: X – → Y such that there is a rational map Y – → X inverse to f. A birational map induces an isomorphism from a nonempty open subset of X to a nonempty open subset of Y. In this case, we say that X and Y are birational, or birationally equivalent. In algebraic terms, two varieties over a field k are birational if and only if their function fields are isomorphic as extension fields of k.