MATH Seminar

Title: Hidden Smoothness of Varieties
Seminar: Algebra and Number Theory
Speaker: Matt Satriano of University of Michigan
Contact: David Zureick-Brown, dzb@mathcs.emory.edu
Date: 2012-09-05 at 3:00PM
Venue: W306
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Abstract: (No prior knowledge of stacks will be assumed for this talk.) From many perspectives, varieties with quotient singularities behave as if they were smooth. One way to explain this phenomenon is that such varieties are the underlying spaces of smooth stacks. We discuss generalizations of this fact and obtain purely scheme-theoretic applications to invariant theory, Hodge theory, and birational geometry.