An algebraic surface is an algebraic variety of dimension two. In the case of geometry over the field of complex numbers, an algebraic surface has complex dimension two (as a complex manifold, when it is non-singular) and so of dimension four as a smooth manifold.
An algebraic surface is an algebraic variety of dimension two. In the case of geometry over the field of complex numbers, an algebraic surface has complex dimension two (as a complex manifold, when it is non-singular) and so of dimension four as a smooth manifold.
In the case of dimension one varieties are classified by only the topological genus, but dimension two, the difference between the arithmetic genus p_a and the geometric genus p_g turns to be important because we cannot distinguish birationally only the topological genus. Then we introduce the irregularity for the classification of them.
