Mirror symmetry and toric geometry (Q1126724)

The paper is a very brief survey of the use of toric methods in mirror symmetry. It follows a talk given by the author at the International Congress of Mathematicians ICM 1998 in Berlin and reflects the development of this subject in the last decade which was essentially influenced by the author himself. After defining reflexive polyhedra, the paper recalls their duality and shows how this notion leads to families of CY hypersurfaces (Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces) in certain toric Fano varieties. Their crepant resolutions pass the first test for being mirror partners -- they satisfy the famous relation between the Hodge diamonds. However, since crepant resolutions are rare in higher dimensions, one has to replace this concept in general by the notion of the so-called stringy Hodge numbers. In case of quotient singularities, they are related to the orbifold Euler number and the McKay correspondence. In the third section, Batyrev reports about counting rational curves on CY manifolds. The toric framework makes it possible to predict their number as the coefficients in some power series arising from generalized GKZ-hypergeometric (Gelfand-Kapranov-Zelevinski) functions occurring from periods of differential forms on the mirror partner. A mathematical verification of this fact has been obtained by Givental'. Finally, the author notes recent developments concerning CY's occurring as complete intersections in ambient spaces that are not toric.