In algebraic geometry, a Fano variety, introduced by Gino Fano (Fano 1934, 1942), is an algebraic variety that generalizes certain aspects of complete intersections of algebraic hypersurfaces whose sum of degrees is at most the total dimension of the ambient projective space. Such complete intersections have important applications in geometry and number theory, because they typically admit rational points, an elementary case of which is the Chevalley–Warning theorem. Fano varieties provide an abstract generalization of these basic examples for which rationality questions are often still tractable.
Formally, a Fano variety is a complete variety X whose anticanonical bundle KX* is ample. In this definition, one could assume that X is smooth over a field, but the minimal model program has also led to the study of Fano varieties with various types of singularities, such as terminal or klt singularities. Recently techniques in differential geometry have been applied to the study of Fano varieties over the complex numbers, and success has been found in constructing moduli spaces of Fano varieties and proving the existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics on them through the study of K-stability of Fano varieties.