Resolution of Singularities of Surfaces
Surfaces have many different nonsingular projective models (unlike the case of curves where the nonsingular projective model is unique). However a surface still has a unique minimal resolution, that all others factor through (all others are resolutions of it). In higher dimensions there need not be a minimal resolution.
Resolution for surfaces over the complex numbers was given informal proofs by Levi (1899), Chisini (1921) and Albanese (1924). A rigorous proof was first given by Walker (1935), and an algebraic proof for all fields of characteristic 0 was given by Zariski (1939). Abhyankar (1956) gave a proof for surfaces of non-zero characteristic. Resolution of singularities has also been shown for all excellent 2-dimensional schemes (including all arithmetic surfaces) by Lipman (1978).
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