Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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Rationality

Speaker: Alena Pirutka, Courant Institute, New York University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, March 6, 2026, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

Recall that an algebraic variety is rational if it is birational to a projective space.
In the past decade it was established that several classes of complex varieties are not (stably) rational: this includes very general hypersurfaces in a certain degree range, cyclic covers, and other varieties.  In this talk we will review classical results, and the recent progress.