Rhombic tilings and Bott-Samelson varieties

Elnitsky gave an elegant bijection between rhombic tilings of 2n-gons and commutation classes of reduced words in the symmetric group on n letters. We explain a natural connection between Elnitsky’s and Magyar’s construction of the Bott-Samelson resolution of Schubert varieties. This suggests using tilings to encapsulate Bott-Samelson data and indicates a geometric perspective on Elnitsky’s combinatorics. We also extend this construction by assigning desingularizations to the zonotopal tilings considered by Tenner. This is based on joint work with Pechenik, Tenner and Yong.