Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In algebraic geometry, a surface of general type is an algebraic surface with Kodaira dimension 2. Because of Chow''s theorem any compact complex manifold of dimension 2 and with Kodaira dimension 2 will actually be an algebraic surface, and in some sense most surfaces are in this class.Gieseker showed that there is a coarse moduli scheme for surfaces of general type; this means that for any fixed values of the Chern numbers c12 and c2, there is a quasi-projective scheme classifying the surfaces of general type with those Chern numbers. It remains a very difficult problem to describe these schemes explicitly, and there are few pairs of Chern numbers for which this has been done (except when the scheme is empty).