In algebraic geometry, the Cremona group, introduced by Cremona (1863, 1865), is the group of birational automorphisms of the
-dimensional projective space over a field
It is denoted by
{\displaystyle Bir(\mathbb {P} ^{n}(k))}
The Cremona group is naturally identified with the automorphism group
{\displaystyle \mathrm {Aut} _{k}(k(x_{1},...,x_{n}))}
of the field of the rational functions in
is a pure transcendental extension of
, with transcendence degree
The projective general linear group of order
, of projective transformations, is contained in the Cremona group of order
, in which case both the numerator and the denominator of a transformation must be linear.
In two dimensions, Max Noether and Guido Castelnuovo showed that the complex Cremona group is generated by the standard quadratic transformation, along with
{\displaystyle \mathrm {PGL} (3,k)}
, though there was some controversy about whether their proofs were correct, and Gizatullin (1983) gave a complete set of relations for these generators.
The structure of this group is still not well understood, though there has been a lot of work on finding elements or subgroups of it.
There is little known about the structure of the Cremona group in three dimensions and higher though many elements of it have been described.
Blanc (2010) showed that it is (linearly) connected, answering a question of Serre (2010).
There is no easy analogue of the Noether–Castelnouvo theorem as Hudson (1927) showed that the Cremona group in dimension at least 3 is not generated by its elements of degree bounded by any fixed integer.
A De Jonquières group is a subgroup of a Cremona group of the following form [citation needed].
Pick a transcendence basis
for a field extension of
Then a De Jonquières group is the subgroup of automorphisms of
mapping the subfield
It has a normal subgroup given by the Cremona group of automorphisms of
, and the quotient group is the Cremona group of
It can also be regarded as the group of birational automorphisms of the fiber bundle
the De Jonquières group is the group of Cremona transformations fixing a pencil of lines through a given point, and is the semidirect product of
{\displaystyle \mathrm {PGL} _{2}(k)}
{\displaystyle \mathrm {PGL} _{2}(k(t))}