Measures of irrationality for hypersurfaces of large degree

We study various measures of irrationality for hypersurfaces of large degree in projective space and other varieties. These include the least degree of a rational covering of projective space, and the minimal gonality of a covering family of curves. The theme is that positivity properties of canonical bundles lead to lower bounds on these invariants. In particular, we prove that if X is a very general smooth hypersurface of degree d in the (n+1)-dimensional projective space, then any dominant rational mapping from X to P^n must have degree at least d-1. We also propose a number of open problems, and we show how our methods lead to simple new proofs of results of Ran and Beheshti–Eisenbud concerning varieties of multi-secant lines.