An introduction to real oriented blowups in toric, toroidal and logarithmic geometries

Abstract: This text is an introduction to the applications of rounding of complex log spaces (also known as Kato-Nakayama or Betti realization) to singularity theory. Log spaces in the sense of Fontaine and Illusie were first described in print by Kato, in a 1988 paper. Rounding of complex log spaces was introduced in a 1999 paper by Kato and Nakayama and is a functorial generalization of A'Campo's 1975 notion of a real oriented blowup. It allows to cut canonically any complex toroidal variety $X$ along its toroidal boundary $\partial X$, producing a topological manifold-with-boundary, whose boundary is a canonical representative of the boundary of any tubular neighborhood of $\partial X$ in $X$. In singularity theory, roundings may be used to get canonical representatives of links of isolated complex analytic singularities and of Milnor fibers of smoothings of complex singularities, once toroidal resolutions of the singularity or of the smoothing are chosen. The text starts with introductions to not necessarily normal toric varieties, it passes then to toroidal varieties and to their real oriented blowups. It continues with introductions to log spaces and to rounding of complex log spaces. It concludes with an important theorem of Nakayama and Ogus about the local triviality of the rounding of special types of log morphisms. The notions of affine toric variety, real oriented blowup, log structure and rounding are introduced by means of the classical passage to polar coordinates.