BCAM Scientific Seminar: Birational geometry of degenerations of surfaces

This talk is about the explicit birational geometry of degenerations of smooth surfaces into surfaces with only log terminal singularities. There is an explicit machinery after the work of Mori, Kollár-Mori, Mori-Prokhorov, and Hacking-Tevelev-U ("Flipping surfaces" https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1580). By the end, I will exemplify with degenerations of the complex projective plane, in relation to my recent joint work with Juan Pablo Zúñiga (UC Chile) "The birational geometry of Markov numbers"  https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17957).