West End Number Theory Seminar: de Quehen

This introductory talk will use the combinatorial nature of polyhedral cone decompositions to give a concrete construction of toric varieties. This concrete description, along with the fact that they are natural generalizations of projective varieties, explains why toric varieties are commonly uses as examples for testing conjectures. During this talk we will focus on examples rather than building the more general theory as our aim is to apply this construction in subsequent talks to toroidal compactifications.