The theory of surfaces has reached a certain stage of completeness and major efforts concentrate on solving concrete questions rather than further developing the formal theory. Many of these questions are touched on in this classic volume: such as the classification of quartic surfaces, the description of moduli spaces for abelian surfaces, and the automorphism group of a Kummer surface. First printed in 1905 after the untimely death of the author, this work has stood for most of this century as one of the classic reference works in geometry.

Classical algebraic geometry, inseparably connected with the names of Abel, Riemann, Weierstrass, Poincare, Clebsch, Jacobi and other outstanding mathematicians of the last century, was mainly an analytical theory. In our century the methods and ideas of topology, commutative algebra and Grothendieck's schemes enriched it and seemed to have replaced once and forever the somewhat naive language of classical algebraic geometry. This classic book, written in 1897, covers the whole of algebraic geometry and associated theories. Baker discusses the subject in terms of transcendental functions, and...