The theory of Frobenius splittings has made a significant impact in the study of the geometry of flag varieties and representation theory. This work, unique in book literature, systematically develops the theory and covers all its major developments.

Key features:

* Concise, efficient exposition unfolds from basic introductory material on Frobenius splittingsa "definitions, properties and examplesa "to cutting edge research

* Studies in detail the geometry of Schubert varieties, their syzygies, equivariant embeddings of reductive groups, Hilbert Schemes, canonical splittings, good filtrations, among other topics

* Applies Frobenius splitting methods to algebraic geometry and various problems in representation theory

* Many examples, exercises, and open problems suggested throughout

* Comprehensive bibliography and index

This book will be an excellent resource for mathematicians and graduate students in algebraic geometry and representation theory of algebraic groups.

This book originates from a series of 10 lectures given by Professor Michel Brion at the Chennai Mathematical Institute during January 2011. The book presents a theorem due to Chevalley on the structure of connected algebraic groups, over algebraically closed fields, as the starting point of various other structure results developed in the recent past. Chevalley's structure theorem states that any connected algebraic group over an algebraically closed field is an extension of an abelian variety by a connected affine algebraic group. This theorem forms the foundation for the classification of anti-affine groups which plays a central role in the development of the structure theory of homogeneous bundles over abelian varieties and for the classification of complete homogeneous varieties. All these results are presented in this book. The book begins with an overview of the results exposed, the proofs of which constitute the rest of the book. Various open questions also have been indicated in the course of the exposition. This book assumes certain preliminary knowledge of linear algebraic groups, abelian varieties and algebraic geometry. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in algebraic geometry.