Sextic double solids, double covers of $\mathbb P^3$ branched along a sextic surface, are the lowest degree Gorenstein terminal Fano 3-folds, hence are expected to behave very rigidly in terms of birational geometry. Smooth sextic double solids, and those which are $\mathbb Q$-factorial with ordinary double points, are known to be birationally rigid. In this paper, we study sextic double solids with an isolated compound $A_n$ singularity. We prove a sharp bound $n \leq 8$, describe models for each n explicitly, and prove that sextic double solids with $n> 3$ are birationally nonrigid.

For a general Fano 3-fold of index 1 in the weighted projective space ℙ(1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3) we construct two new birational models that are Mori fibre spaces in the framework of the so-called Sarkisov program. We highlight a relation between the corresponding birational maps, as a circle of Sarkisov links, visualizing the notion of relations in the Sarkisov program.

The Sarkisov program studies birational maps between varieties that are end products of the Minimal Model Program (MMP) on nonsingular uniruled varieties. If $X$ and $Y$ are terminal $ \mathbb{Q} $-factorial projective varieties endowed with a structure of Mori fibre space, a birational map $f: X\dashrightarrow Y$ is the composition of a finite number of elementary Sarkisov links. This decomposition is in general not unique: two such define a relation in the Sarkisov program. I define elementary relations, and show they generate relations in the Sarkisov program. Roughly speaking, elementary relations are the relations among the end products of suitable relative MMPs of $Z$ over $W$ with $\rho (Z/ W)= 3$.

We introduce a strategy based on Kustin–Miller unprojection that allows us to construct many hundreds of Gorenstein codimension 4 ideals with 9×16 resolutions (that is, nine equations and sixteen first syzygies). Our two basic games are called Tom and Jerry; the main application is the biregular construction of most of the anticanonically polarised Mori Fano 3-folds of Altınok’s thesis. There are 115 cases whose numerical data (in effect, the Hilbert series) allow a Type I projection. In every case, at least one Tom and one Jerry construction works, providing at least two deformation families of quasismooth Fano 3-folds having the same numerics but different topology.

The Nagata automorphism is a kind of complicated automorphism on the affine 3-space . For a long time, it remained unknown whether or not the Nagata automorphism is tame until Shestakov and Umirbaev at last proved that it is not tame in 2004, by purely algebraic methods (e.g. Poisson algebra). In this paper, we consider a certain necessary condition for a given automorphism on to be tame from the point of view of the Sarkisov program established by Corti. Furthermore, by using it, we shall give a new algebro-geometric proof of the non-tameness of the Nagata automorphism.