Algebraic Geometry Seminar: Dave Anderson (Washington)

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 this construction has recently been developed further in work of Kaveh-Khovanskii and Lazarsfeld-Mustata. In general, this 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. This project was motivated by examples, and as an application, I'll describe some toric degenerations of flag varieties and Schubert varieties. There will be pictures of polytopes.