V. Lakshmibai – författare

"Singular Loci of Schubert Varieties" is a unique work at the crossroads of representation theory, algebraic geometry, and combinatorics. Over the past 20 years, many research articles have been written on the subject in notable journals. In this work, Billey and Lakshmibai have recreated and restructured the various theories and approaches of those articles and present a clearer understanding of this important subdiscipline of Schubert varieties – namely singular loci. The main focus, therefore, is on the computations for the singular loci of Schubert varieties and corresponding tangent spaces. The methods used include standard monomial theory, the nil Hecke ring, and Kazhdan-Lusztig theory. New results are presented with sufficient examples to emphasize key points. A comprehensive bibliography, index, and tables – the latter not to be found elsewhere in the mathematics literature – round out this concise work. After a good introduction giving background material, the topics are presented in a systematic fashion to engage a wide readership of researchers and graduate students.

This book gives a comprehensive treatment of the Grassmannian varieties and their Schubert subvarieties, focusing on the geometric and representation-theoretic aspects of Grassmannian varieties. Research of Grassmannian varieties is centered at the crossroads of commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and combinatorics. Therefore, this text uniquely presents an exciting playing field for graduate students and researchers in mathematics, physics, and computer science, to expand their knowledge in the field of algebraic geometry. The standard monomial theory (SMT) for the Grassmannian varieties and their Schubert subvarieties are introduced and the text presents some important applications of SMT including the Cohen–Macaulay property, normality, unique factoriality, Gorenstein property, singular loci of Schubert varieties, toric degenerations of Schubert varieties, and the relationship between Schubert varieties and classical invariant theory.

This text would serve well as a reference book for a graduate work on Grassmannian varieties and would be an excellent supplementary text for several courses including those in geometry of spherical varieties, Schubert varieties, advanced topics in geometric and differential topology, representation theory of compact and reductive groups, Lie theory, toric varieties, geometric representation theory, and singularity theory. The reader should have some familiarity with commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.

Schubert varieties lie at the cross roads of algebraic geometry, combinatorics, commutative algebra, and representation theory. They are an important class of subvarieties of flag varieties, interesting in their own right, and providing an inductive tool for studying flag varieties. The literature on them is vast, for they are ubiquitous - they have been intensively studied over the last fifty years, from many different points of view.

This book is mainly a detailed account of a particularly interesting instance of their occurrence: namely, in relation to classical invariant theory. More precisely, it is about the connection between the first and second fundamental theorems of classical invariant theory and standard monomial theory for Schubert varieties in certain special flag varieties. Historically, this connection was the prime motivation for the development of standard monomial theory. Determinantal varieties and basic concepts of geometric invariant theory arise naturally in establishing the connection.