Cox rings of rational surfaces and flag varieties of ADE-types

Abstract: The Cox rings of del Pezzo surfaces are closely related to the Lie groups E_n. In this paper, we generalize the definition of Cox rings to G- surfaces defined by us earlier, where the Lie groups G=A_n, D_n or E_n. We show that the Cox ring of a G-surface S is almost determined by an irreducible representation V of G, and is generated by degree one elements. The Proj of this ring is a sub-variety of the orbit of the highest weight vector in V, and both are closed sub-varieties of the projective space P(V) defined by quadratic equations.