In mathematics, particularly in algebraic geometry, complex analysis and algebraic number theory, an abelian variety is a projective algebraic variety that is also an algebraic group, i.e., has a group law that can be defined by regular functions. Abelian varieties are at the same time among the most studied objects in algebraic geometry and indispensable tools for much research on other topics in algebraic geometry and number theory.

An abelian variety can be defined by equations having coefficients in any field; the variety is then said to be defined over that field. Historically the first abelian varieties to be studied were those defined over the field of complex numbers. Such abelian varieties turn out to be exactly those complex tori that can be embedded into a complex projective space.

Abelian varieties defined over algebraic number fields are a special case, which is important also from the viewpoint of number theory. Localization techniques lead naturally from abelian varieties defined over number fields to ones defined over finite fields and various local fields. Since a number field is the fraction field of a Dedekind domain, for any nonzero prime of your Dedekind domain, there is a map from the Dedekind domain to the quotient of the Dedekind domain by the prime, which is a finite field for all finite primes. This induces a map from the fraction field to any such finite field. Given a curve with equation defined over the number field, we can apply this map to the coefficients to get a curve defined over some finite field, where the choices of finite field correspond to the finite primes of the number field.

Abelian varieties appear naturally as Jacobian varieties (the connected components of zero in Picard varieties) and Albanese varieties of other algebraic varieties. The group law of an abelian variety is necessarily commutative and the variety is non-singular. An elliptic curve is an abelian variety of dimension 1. Abelian varieties have Kodaira dimension 0.