Introduction to toric varieties

The course given during the School and Workshop “The Geometry and Topology of Singularities”, 8-26 January 2007, Cuernavaca, Mexico is based on a previous course given during the 23o Coloquio Brasileiro de Matematica (Rio de Janeiro, July 2001). It is an elementary introduction to the theory of toric varieties. This introduction does not pretend to originality but to provide examples and motivation for the study of toric varieties. The theory of toric varieties plays a prominent role in various domains of mathematics, giving explicit relations between combinatorial geometry and algebraic geometry. They provide an important field of examples and models. The Fulton’s preface of [11] explains very well the interest of these objects “Toric varieties provide a ... way to see many examples and phenomena in algebraic geometry... For example, they are rational, and, although they may be singular, the singularities are rational. Nevertheless, toric varieties have provided a remarkably fertile testing ground for general theories.” Basic references for toric varieties are [10], [11] and [15]. These references give complete proofs of the results and descriptions. They were (abusively) used for writing these notes and the reader can consult them for useful complementary references and details. Various applications of toric varieties can be found in the litterature, in particular in the book [11]. Interesting applications and suitable references are given in [7]: applications to Algebraic coding theory, Error-correcting codes, Integer programming and combinatorics, Computing resultants and solving equations, including the study of magic squares (see 8.3). Applications to Symplectic Manifolds are given in [1]. Of course this list is not exhaustive. Special thanks to Gottfried Barthel, Karl-Heinz Fieseler and Ludger Kaup: in their friendly company, I discovered the wonderful country of toric varieties and thanks to them I was able to write these notes.