On Oda's strong factorization conjecture

Abstract

The Oda's Strong Factorization Conjecture states that a proper birational map between smooth toric varieties can be decomposed as a sequence of smooth toric blowups followed by a sequence of smooth toric blowdowns. This article describes an algorithm that conjecturally constructs such a decomposition. Several reductions and simplifications of the algorithm are presented and some special cases of the conjecture are proved.