In this article, we discuss the topology of varieties over $\mathbb {C}$, viz., their homology and homotopy groups. We show that the fundamental group of a quasi-projective variety has negative deficiency under a certain hypothesis on its second homology and therefore a large class of groups cannot arise as fundamental groups of varieties. For a smooth projective surface admitting a fibration over a curve, we give a detailed analysis of the homology and homotopy groups of their universal cover via a case-by-case analysis, depending on the nature of the singular fibers. For smooth, projective surfaces whose universal cover is holomorphically convex (conjecturally always true), we show that the second and third homotopy groups are free abelian, often of infinite rank.

We extend to compact Kähler manifolds some classical results on linear representation of fundamental groups of complex projective manifolds. Our approach, based on an interversion lemma for fibrations with tori versus general type manifolds as fibers, gives a refinement of the classical work of Zuo. We extend to the Kähler case some general results on holomorphic convexity of coverings such as the linear Shafarevich conjecture.

We study complex commutative Banach algebras (and, more generally, continuous inverse algebras) in which the holomorphic functions of a fixed $n$-tuple of elements are dense. In particular, we characterize the compact subsets of ${{\mathbb{C}}^{n}}$ which appear as joint spectra of such $n$ -tuples. The characterization is compared with several established notions of holomorphic convexity by means of approximation conditions.