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In mathematics, a del Pezzo surface or Fano surface is a two-dimensional Fano variety, in other words a non-singular projective algebraic surface with ample anticanonical divisor class. They are in some sense the opposite of surfaces of general type, whose canonical class is big.
They are named for Pasquale del Pezzo who studied the surfaces with the more restrictive condition that they have a very ample anticanonical divisor class, or in his language the surfaces with a degree n embedding in n-dimensional projective space (del Pezzo 1887), which are the del Pezzo surfaces of degree at least 3.