Polyhedral structures on tropical varieties

Tropical varieties are polyhedral shadows of classical varieties. The purpose of these expository notes is to explain the origin of this polyhedral complex structure from the perspective of Gr\"obner bases. To appear in the proceedings of the 2011 Bellairs Workshop in Number Theory

Lower and upper bounds for nef cones

The nef cone of a projective variety Y is an important and often elusive invariant. In this paper we construct two polyhedral lower bounds and one polyhedral upper bound for the nef cone of Y using an embedding of Y into a toric variety. The lower bounds generalize the combinatorial description of the nef cone of a Mori dream space, while the upper bound generalizes the F-conjecture for the nef cone of the moduli space \bar{M}_{0,n} to a wide class of varieties.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures. Final version to appear in IMR

Uniform bounds on multigraded regularity

We give an effective uniform bound on the multigraded regularity of a subscheme of a smooth projective toric variety X with a given multigraded Hilbert polynomial. To establish this bound, we introduce a new combinatorial tool, called a Stanley filtration, for studying monomial ideals in the homogeneous coordinate ring of X. As a special case, we obtain a new proof of Gotzmann's regularity theorem. We also discuss applications of this bound to the construction of multigraded Hilbert schemes.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure