General elephant explained

In algebraic geometry, general elephant is an idiosyncratic name for a general element of the anticanonical system of a variety, introduced by Miles Reid.^[1] For 3-folds the general elephant problem (or conjecture) asks whether general elephants have at most du Val singularities; this has been proved in several cases.^{[2] [3]}

Notes and References

1. Book: Reid, M. . 1985 . Young person's guide to canonical singularities . Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics . 46 . 1 . 345–414 . 10.1090/pspum/046.1/927963 . 9780821814765 . 116194977 . en.
2. Kawakita . Masayuki . 2003 . General Elephants of Three-Fold Divisorial Contractions . Journal of the American Mathematical Society . 16 . 2 . 331–362 . 10.1090/S0894-0347-02-00416-2 . 30041435 . 0894-0347. free .
3. Prokhorov . Yuri . 1996 . On the general elephant conjecture for Mori conic bundles . alg-geom/9608007.