Results and evidence from toric ambient spaces have often been precursors to breakthroughs in many areas of mathematics and string theory. These include the Minimal Model Program in higher-dimensional birational geometry and boundedness results for elliptically fibered Calabi–Yau varieties. We will review some of these developments and conclude with a recent result establishing an effective bound on the rank of the Mordell–Weil group of Calabi–Yau threefolds, in which toric varieties play a key, but somewhat hidden, role.