Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2017
We show that the Craighero–Gattazzo surface, the minimal resolution of an explicit complex quintic surface with four elliptic singularities, is simply connected. This was conjectured by Dolgachev and Werner, who proved that its fundamental group has a trivial profinite completion. The Craighero–Gattazzo surface is the only explicit example of a smooth simply connected complex surface of geometric genus zero with ample canonical class. We hope that our method will find other applications: to prove a topological fact about a complex surface we use an algebraic reduction mod $p$ technique and deformation theory.