Ring-theoretic blowing down: I
  One of the major open problems in noncommutative algebraic geometry is the classification of noncommutative projective surfaces (or, slightly more generally, of noetherian connected graded domains of Gelfand-Kirillov dimension 3). Earlier work of the authors classified the connected graded noetherian subalgebras of Sklyanin algebras using a noncommutative analogue of blowing up. In order to understand other algebras birational to a Sklyanin algebra, one also needs a notion of blowing down.   This is achieved in this paper, where we give a noncommutative analogue of Castelnuovo's classic theorem that (-1)-lines on a smooth surface can be contracted. The resulting noncommutative blown-down algebra has pleasant properties; in particular it is always noetherian and is smooth if the original noncommutative surface is smooth.   In a companion paper we will use this technique to construct explicit birational transformations between various noncommutative surfaces which contain an elliptic curve. 
D. Rogalski and S. J. Sierra and J. T. Stafford
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