Superisolated Surface Singularities

In this survey, we review part of the theory of superisolated surface singularities (SIS) and its applications including some new and recent developments. The class of SIS singularities is, in some sense, the simplest class of germs of normal surface singularities. Namely, their tangent cones are reduced curves and the geometry and topology of the SIS singularities can be deduced from them. Thus this class \emph{contains}, in a canonical way, all the complex projective plane curve theory, which gives a series of nice examples and counterexamples. They were introduced by I. Luengo to show the non-smoothness of the $\mu$-constant stratum and have been used to answer negatively some other interesting open questions. We review them and the new results on normal surface singularities whose link are rational homology spheres. We also discuss some positive results which have been proved for SIS singularities.Comment: Survey article for the Proceedings of the Conference "Singularities and Computer Algebra" on Occasion of Gert-Martin Greuel's 60th Birthday, LMS Lecture Notes (to appear

On piecewise isomorphism of some varieties

Two quasi-projective varieties are called piecewise isomorphic if they can be stratified into pairwise isomorphic strata. We show that the m-th symmetric power $S^m(C^n)$ of the complex affine space $C^n$ is piecewise isomorphic to $C^{mn}$ and the m-th symmetric power $S^m(CP^\infty)$ of the infinite dimensional complex projective space is piecewise isomorphic to the infinite dimensional Grassmannian $Gr(m,\infty)$