This blog post is mean to be an exposition on quasi-projective varieties, something that I am having problems understanding. A quasi-projective variety is a locally closed projective variety. What does that mean? It means that it is the intesection of a Zariski open set and a Zariski closed set in some projective space. Does this align with what a locally closed set means? This article would confirm that this is indeed the case.
The wikipedia article on quasi-projective varieties states that an affine space is an open set in a projective space. How is this? I can surely understand that an affine space can be embedded in projective space. Then? Oh c’mon. Say the affine space is embedded as
in
. The variety that lies in its complement is
. Hence, being the complement of a closed set, the affine subspace is open.
As any affine variety in can be embedded in
as the intersection of its topological closure in
and the affine chart
, we see that any affine variety is a quasi-projective variety.