THE BIRATIONAL GEOMETRY of TROPICAL COMPACTIFICATIONS Colin Diemer a Dissertation in Mathematics Presented to the Faculties of T
THE BIRATIONAL GEOMETRY OF TROPICAL COMPACTIFICATIONS Colin Diemer A Dissertation in Mathematics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Antonella Grassi, Professor of Mathematics Supervisor of Dissertation Tony Pantev, Professor of Mathematics Graduate Group Chairperson Dissertation Committee Antonella Grassi, Professor of Mathematics Tony Pantev, Professor of Mathematics Ted Chinburg, Professor of Mathematics Acknowledgments I would like thank my advisor Antonella Grassi for suggesting tropical geometry as a possible dissertation topic (and for her truly commendable patience and willingness to help). Ron Donagi, Tony Pantev, Jonathan Block, and Erik van Erp also helped me find my way mathematically here at Penn. Conversations with Paul Hacking, Jenia Tevelev, Eric Katz, Ilia Zharkov, Eduardo Cattani, and Alicia Dickenstein were beneficial during the preparation of this thesis. This thesis is dedicated to my father. ii ABSTRACT THE BIRATIONAL GEOMETRY OF TROPICAL COMPACTIFICATIONS Colin Diemer Antonella Grassi, Advisor We study compactifications of subvarieties of algebraic tori using methods from the still developing subject of tropical geometry. Associated to each \tropical" compactification is a polyhedral object called a tropical fan. Techniques developed by Hacking, Keel, and Tevelev [19, 45] relate the polyhedral geometry of the tropical variety to the algebraic geometry of the compactification. We compare these constructions to similar classical constructions. The main results of this thesis involve the application of methods from logarithmic geometry in the sense of Iitaka [22] to these compactifications. We derive a precise formula for the log Kodaira dimension and log irregularity in terms of polyhedral geometry.
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