We discuss recent work centred around the birational
geometry of smooth hypersurfaces X of degree d in projective space of
dimension n+1.
We focus on the work of Nathan Chen and David Stapleton who prove that
if d is close to n and n is large then the degree of irrationality is
large.
Washington University in St. Louis,
Mathematics and Statistics Department,
Campux Box 1146,
St. Louis, MO 63130
Phone: (314) 935-6760
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