Rook placements and cellular decomposition of partition varieties

Abstract

In this paper, we study the geometric implication of rook length polynomials introduced in the author's thesis. We introduce the idea of partition varieties. These are certain algebraic varieties which have CW-complex structures. We prove that the cell structure of a partition variety is in one-to-one correspondence with rook placements on a Ferrers board defined by a corresponding partition. This correspondence enables one to characterize the geometric attachment between a cell and the closure of another cell combinatorially. The main result of this paper is that the Poincaré polynomial of cohomology for a partition variety is given by the corresponding rook length polynomial.This paper serves as a transition of our studies from combinatorial aspects to the geometric aspects. To make the transition accessible, we give three appendices on the known results on Grassmann manifolds and flag manifolds which are used frequently. One appendix is on a technical lemma on embeddings of manifolds.