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One of the major open problems in noncommutative algebraic geometry is the classification of noncommutative projective surfaces (or, slightly more generally, of noetherian connected graded domains of Gelfand-Kirillov dimension 3). In a companion paper the authors described a noncommutative version of blowing down and, for example, gave a noncommutative analogue of Castelnuovo's classic theorem that lines of self-intersection (-1) on a smooth surface can be contracted. In this paper we will use these techniques to construct explicit birational transformations between various noncommutative surfaces containing an elliptic curve. Notably we show that Van den Bergh's quadrics can be obtained from the Sklyanin algebra by suitably blowing up and down, and we also provide a noncommutative analogue of the classical Cremona transform. This extends and amplifies earlier work of Presotto and Van den Bergh., Comment: 45 pages; 2 figures; comments welcome

We study Artin-Schelter regular algebras of global dimension 4 with three generators of degree one. We classify those which are domains and which have an additional Z x Z-grading, and prove that all of these examples are also strongly noetherian, Auslander regular, and Cohen-Macaulay., 23 pages; No changes from version 1 except to add second author's name which was inadvertently omitted from original submission

The Weyl algebra over a field $k$ of characteristic $0$ is a simple ring of Gelfand-Kirillov dimension 2, which has a grading by the group of integers. We classify all $\mathbb{Z}$-graded simple rings of GK-dimension 2 and show that they are graded Morita equivalent to generalized Weyl algebras as defined by Bavula. More generally, we study $\mathbb{Z}$-graded simple rings $A$ of any dimension which have a graded quotient ring of the form $K[t, t^{-1}; \sigma]$ for a field $K$. Under some further hypotheses, we classify all such $A$ in terms of a new construction of simple rings which we introduce in this paper. In the important special case that $\operatorname{GKdim} A = \operatorname{tr.deg}(K/k) + 1$, we show that $K$ and $\sigma$ must be of a very special form. The new simple rings we define should warrant further study from the perspective of noncommutative geometry., Comment: 37 pages

We construct a family of connected graded domains of GK-dimension 4 that are birational to P2, and show that the general member of this family is noetherian. This disproves a conjecture of the first author and Stafford. The algebras we construct are Koszul and have global dimension 4. They fail to be Artin-Schelter Gorenstein, however, showing that a theorem of Zhang and Stephenson for dimension 3 algebras does not extend to dimension 4. The Auslander-Buchsbaum formula also fails to hold for our family. The algebras can be obtained as global sections of a certain quasicoherent graded sheaf on P1xP1, and our key technique is to work with this sheaf. In contrast to all previously known examples of birationally commutative graded domains, the graded pieces of the sheaf fail to be ample in the sense of Van den Bergh. Our results thus require significantly new techniques., Comment: 48 pages, 1 figure, comments welcome; v2 introduction rewritten, no other significant changes

If A is a strongly noetherian graded algebra generated in degree one, then there is a canonically constructed graded ring homomorphism from A to a twisted homogeneous coordinate ring B(X, L, sigma), which is surjective in large degree. This result is a key step in the study of projectively simple rings. The proof relies on some results concerning the growth of graded rings which are of independent interest., Comment: LaTeX, 21 pages; corollary of main theorem added to intro; other minor changes from ver. 1