We give a presentation of the plane Cremona group over an algebraically closed field with respect to the generators given by the Theorem of Noether and Castelnuovo. This presentation is particularly simple and can be used for explicit calculations.
The Cremona group is the group of birational transformations of the complex projective plane. In this paper we classify its subgroups that consist only of elliptic elements using elementary model theory. This yields in particular a description of the
structure of torsion subgroups. As an appliction, we prove the Tits alternative for arbitrary subgroups of the Cremona group, generalizing a result of Cantat. We also describe solvable subgroups of the Cremona group and their derived length, refining results from Deserti.
We show that if a group automorphism of a Cremona group of arbitrary rank is also a homeomorphism with respect to either the Zariski or the Euclidean topology, then it is inner up to a field automorphism of the base-field. Moreover, we show that a si
milar result holds if we consider groups of polynomial automorphisms of affine spaces instead of Cremona groups.
We look at algebraic embeddings of the Cremona group in $n$ variables $Cr_n(C)$ to the group of birational transformations $Bir(M)$ of an algebraic variety $M$. First we study geometrical properties of an example of an embedding of $Cr_2(C)$ into $Cr
_5(C)$ that is due to Gizatullin. In a second part, we give a full classification of all algebraic embeddings of $Cr_2(C)$ into $Bir(M)$, where $dim(M)=3$, and generalize this result partially to algebraic embeddings of $Cr_n(C)$ into $Bir(M)$, where $dim(M)=n+1$, for arbitrary $ngeq 2$. In particular, this yields a classification of all algebraic $PGL_{n+1}(C)$-actions on smooth projective varieties of dimension $n+1$ that can be extended to rational actions of $Cr_n(C)$.
For each d we construct CAT(0) cube complexes on which Cremona groups rank d act by isometries. From these actions we deduce new and old group theoretical and dynamical results about Cremona groups. In particular, we study the dynamical behaviour of
the irreducible components of exceptional loci, we prove regularization theorems, we find new constraints on the degree growth for non-regularizable birational transformations, and we show that the centralizer of certain birational transformations is small.