Rook placements and cellular decomposition of partition varieties (Q1363657)

The paper deals with partition varieties, i.e., projective varieties associated to some partition \(\lambda=(\lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_n)\). The main result is that the partition variety of \(\lambda\) is a CW-complex which has a cellular decomposition that can be described combinatorially in terms of rook placements of the Ferrers board of \(\lambda\), and that the Poincaré polynomial \(P_\lambda(q)\) for the cohomology equals \(R_\lambda(q^2)\), where \(R_\lambda\) is the rook length polynomial of \(\lambda\). The combinatorial description of the cells also characterizes the geometric situtation, i.e., whether some cell is contained in the closure of another cell. The exposition is self-contained. Many examples and four appendices (concerning Grassmannian manifolds, Schubert varieties, flag manifolds and an embedding theorem) make the paper accessible also to the non-expert in algebraic geometry.