Local geometry of random geodesics on negatively curved surfaces

It is shown that the tessellation of a compact, negatively curved surface induced by a typical long geodesic segment, when properly scaled, looks locally like a Poisson line process. This implies that the global statistics of the tessellation -- for instance, the fraction of triangles -- approach those of the limiting Poisson line process.Comment: This version extends the results of the previous version to surfaces with possibly variable negative curvatur

Standard Monomial Theory for Bott-Samelson Varieties of GL(n)

We construct an explicit basis for the coordinate ring of the Bott-Samelson variety Z_i associated to G = GL(n) and an arbitrary sequence of simple reflections i. Our basis is parametrized by certain standard tableaux and generalizes the Standard Monomial basis for Schubert varieties. Our standard tableaux have a natural crystal graph structure.Comment: Northeastern University, [email protected] AMSTeX amspp