Some Remarks on Calabi-Yau Manifolds

Here we focus on the geometry of the “mirror quintic” Y and its generalizations. In particular, we illustrate how to obtain new birational models of Y . The article under review can be regarded as an announcement of or supplement to results in forthcoming papers of the author and his collaborators concerning quintic threefolds, the Dwork pencil, and its natural generalization to higher dimensions [G. Bini, “Quotients of hypersurfaces in weighted projective space”, preprint, arxiv.org/ abs/0905.2099, Adv. Geom., to appear; G. Bini, B. van Geemen and T. L. Kelly, “Mirror quintics, discrete symmetries and Shioda maps”, preprint, arxiv.org/abs/0809. 1791, J. Algebraic Geom., to appear; G. Bini and A. Garbagnati, “The geometry of the generalized Dwork pencil and its quotients”, in preparation].