Equations defining abelian varieties

In mathematics, the concept of abelian variety is the higher-dimensional generalization of the elliptic curve. The equations defining abelian varieties are a topic of study because every abelian variety is a projective variety. In dimension d ≥ 2, however, it is no longer as straightforward to discuss such equations.

There is a large classical literature on this question, which in a reformulation is, for complex algebraic geometry, a question of describing relations between theta functions. The modern geometric treatment now refers to some basic papers of David Mumford, from 1966 to 1967, which reformulated that theory in terms from abstract algebraic geometry valid over general fields.