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Back to Algebraic Geometry Seminar: Fall 2011

Algebraic Geometry Seminar


Date: Tuesday, Nov 15, 2011

Time: 3:30PM - 4:30PM

Location: LCB 222


Dave Anderson

University of Washington

Title

Okounkov bodies, toric degenerations, and polytopes

Abstract

Given a projective variety X of dimension d, a “flag” of subvarieties Y_i, and a big divisor D, Okounkov showed how to construct a convex body in R^d, and in the last few years, this construction has been developed further in work of Kaveh-Khovanskii and Lazarsfeld-Mustata. In general, the Okounkov body is quite hard to understand, but when X is a toric variety, it is just the polytope associated to D via the standard yoga of toric geometry. I’ll describe a more general situation where the Okounkov body is still a polytope, and show that in this case X admits a flat degeneration to the corresponding toric variety. As an application, I’ll describe some toric degenerations of flag varieties and Schubert varieties, and explain how the Okounkov bodies arising generalize the Gelfand-Tsetlin polytopes.

Algebraic Geometry

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