These lectures discuss recent advances on syzygies on algebraic curves, especially concerning the Green, the Prym-Green and the Green-Lazarsfeld Secant Conjectures. The methods used are largely geometric and variational, with a special emphasis on examples and explicit calculations. The notes are based on series of lectures given in Daejeon (March 2013), Rome (November-December 2015) and Guanajuato (February 2016).
The purpose of this paper is to prove Ein--Lazarsfeld's conjecture on asymptotic vanishing of syzygies of algebraic varieties. This result, together with Ein--Lazarsfeld's asymptotic nonvanishing theorem, describes the overall picture of asymptotic behaviors of the minimal free resolutions of the graded section rings of line bundles on a projective variety as the positivity of the line bundles grows. Previously, Raicu reduced the problem to the case of products of three projective spaces, and we resolve this case here.
We show that a small variant of the methods used by Voisin in her study of canonical curves leads to a surprisingly quick proof of the gonality conjecture of Green and the second author, asserting that one can read off the gonality of a curve C from its resolution in the embedding defined by any one line bundle of sufficiently large degree. More generally, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the asymptotic vanishing of the weight one syzygies of the module associated to an arbitrary line bundle on C.
This paper studies the asymptotic behavior of the syzygies of a smooth projective variety X as the positivity of the embedding line bundle grows. We prove that as least as far as grading is concerned, the minimal resolution of the ideal of X has a surprisingly uniform asymptotic shape: roughly speaking, generators eventually appear in almost all degrees permitted by Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity. This suggests in particular that a widely-accepted intuition derived from the case of curves -- namely that syzygies become simpler as the degree of the embedding increases -- may have been misleadin…
This paper is a survey of recent work on the asymptotic behavior of the syzygies of a smooth complex projective variety as the positivity of the embedding line bundle grows. After a quick overview of results from the 1980s and 1990s concerning the linearity of the first few terms of a resolution, we discuss a non-vanishing theorem to the effect that from an asymptotic viewpoint, essentially all of the syzygy modules that could be non-zero are in fact non-zero. We explain the quick new proof of this result in the case of Veronese varieties due to Erman and authors, and we explore some results a…
We show that the implicit equation of a surface in 3-dimensional projective space parametrized by bi-homogeneous polynomials of bi-degree (d,d), for a given positive integer d, can be represented and computed from the linear syzygies of its parametrization if the base points are isolated and form locally a complete intersection.
In recent years, multiplier ideals have found many applications in local and global algebraic geometry. Because of their importance, there has been some interest in the question of which ideals on a smooth complex variety can be realized as multiplier ideals. Other than integral closure no local obstructions have been known up to now, and in dimension two it was established by Favre-Jonsson and Lipman-Watanabe that any integrally closed ideal is locally a multiplier ideal. We prove the somewhat unexpected result that multiplier ideals in fact satisfy some rather strong algebraic properties inv…
This work consists of two parts. In the first part we develop new techniques to compute Koszul cohomology groups for several classes of varieties. As applications we prove results on projective normality and syzygies for algebraic surfaces. From more general results we obtain in particular the following: a) Mukai's conjecture (and stronger variants of it) regarding projective normality and normal presentation for surfaces with Kodaira dimension 0, and uniform bounds for higher syzygies associated to adjoint linear series, b) effective bounds along the lines of Mukai's conjecture regarding proj…
We give simple geometric proofs of Aprodu-Farkas-Papadima-Raicu-Weyman's theorem on syzygies of tangent developable surfaces of rational normal curves and Raicu-Sam's result on syzygies of K3 carpets. As a consequence, we obtain a quick proof of Green's conjecture for general curves of genus $g$ over an algebraically closed field $\mathbf{k}$ with $\operatorname{char}(\mathbf{k}) = 0$ or $\operatorname{char}(\mathbf{k}) \geq \lfloor (g-1)/2 \rfloor$. We also show the arithmetic normality of tangent developable surfaces of arbitrary smooth projective curves of large degree.
Parameterized algebraic curves and surfaces are widely used in geometric modeling and their manipulation is an important task in the processing of geometric models. In particular, the determination of the intersection loci between points, pieces of parameterized algebraic curves and pieces of algebraic surfaces is a key problem in this context. In this paper, we survey recent methods based on syzygies and blowup algebras for computing the image and the finite fibers of a curve or surface parameterization, more generally of a rational map. Conceptually, the main idea is to use elimination matri…
This is an introduction, aimed at a general mathematical audience, to recent work of Aprodu, Farkas, Papadima, Raicu and Weyman. These authors established a long-standing folk conjecture concerning the equations defining the tangent developable surface of a rational normal curve. This in turn led to a new proof of a fundamental theorem of Voisin on the syzygies of a general canonical curve. The present note, which is the write-up of a talk given by the second author at the Current Events seminar at the 2019 JMM, surveys this circle of ideas.
We discuss recent progress on syzygies of curves, including proofs of Green's and Gonality Conjectures as well as applications of Koszul cycles to the study of the birational geometry of various moduli spaces of curves. We prove a number of new results, including a complete solution to Green's Conjecture for arbitrary hexagonal curves. Finally, we propose several new conjectures on syzygies, including a Prym-Green conjecture for l-roots of trivial bundles as well as a strong Maximal Rank Conjecture for generic curves. To appear in the Proceedings of Clay Mathematical Institute.
We define syzygy points of projective schemes, and introduce a program of studying their GIT stability. Then we describe two cases where we have managed to make some progress in this program, that of polarized K3 surfaces of odd genus, and of genus six canonical curves. Applications of our results include effectivity statements for divisor classes on the moduli space of odd genus K3 surfaces, and a new construction in the Hassett-Keel program for the moduli space of genus six curves.
Green's Conjecture predicts than one can read off special linear series on an algebraic curve, by looking at the syzygies of its canonical embedding. We extend Voisin's results on syzygies of K3 sections, to the case of K3 surfaces with arbitrary Picard lattice. This, coupled with results of Voisin and Hirschowitz-Ramanan, provides a complete solution to Green's Conjecture for smooth curves on arbitrary K3 surfaces.
A major unsolved problem (according to Demailly 1997) towards the Kobayashi hyperbolicity conjecture in optimal degree is to understand jet differentials of germs of holomorphic discs that are invariant under any reparametrization of the source. The underlying group action is not reductive, but we provide a complete algorithm to generate all invariants, in arbitrary dimension n and for jets of arbitrary order k. Two main new situations are studied in great details. For jets of order 4 in dimension 4, we establish that the algebra of Demailly-Semple invariants is generated by 2835 polynomials, …
We prove a strong vanishing result for finite length Koszul modules, and use it to derive Green's conjecture for every g-cuspidal rational curve over an algebraically closed field k with char(k) = 0 or char(k) >= (g+2)/2. As a consequence, we deduce that the general canonical curve of genus g satisfies Green's conjecture in this range. Our results are new in positive characteristic, whereas in characteristic zero they provide a different proof for theorems first obtained in two landmark papers by Voisin. Our strategy involves establishing two key results of independent interest: (1) we describ…
We give a survey of algorithms for computing topological invariants of semi-algebraic sets with special emphasis on the more recent developments in designing algorithms for computing the Betti numbers of semi-algebraic sets. Aside from describing these results, we discuss briefly the background as well as the importance of these problems, and also describe the main tools from algorithmic semi-algebraic geometry, as well as algebraic topology, which make these advances possible. We end with a list of open problems.
We survey the area of algebraic complexity theory; with the focus being on the problem of polynomial identity testing (PIT). We discuss the key ideas that have gone into the results of the last few years.
We discuss Hironaka's theorem on resolution of singularities in charactetistic 0 as well as more recent progress, both on simplifying and improving Hironaka's method of proof and on new results and directions on families of varieties, leading to joint work on toroidal orbifolds with Michael Temkin and Jarosław Włodarczyk.
In this article we explain the theory of rigid residue complexes in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, summarizing the background, recent results and anticipated future results. Unlike all previous approaches to Grothendiec Duality, the rigid approach concentrates on the construction of rigid residue complexes over rings, and their intricate yet robust properties. The geometrization, i.e. the passage to rigid residue complexes on schemes and Deligne-Mumford (DM) stacks, by gluing, is fairly easy. In the geometric part of the theory, the main results are the Rigid Residue Theorem and t…
I will discuss recent progress by many people in the program of extending natural topological invariants from manifolds to singular spaces. Intersection homology theory and mixed Hodge theory are model examples of such invariants. The past 20 years have seen a series of new invariants, partly inspired by string theory, such as motivic integration and the elliptic genus of a singular variety. These theories are not defined in a topological way, but there are intriguing hints of their topological significance.
Tropical geometry is a piecewise linear "shadow" of algebraic geometry. It allows for the computation of several cohomological invariants of an algebraic variety. In particular, its application to enumerative algebraic geometry led to significant progress. In this survey, we give an introduction to tropical geometry techniques for algebraic curve counting problems. We also survey some recent developments, with a particular emphasis on the computation of the degree of the Severi varieties of the complex projective plane and other toric surfaces as well as Hurwitz numbers and applications to rea…
We develop the theory of Abelian functions associated with algebraic curves. The growth in computer power and an advancement of efficient symbolic computation techniques has allowed for recent progress in this area. In this paper we focus on the genus three cases, comparing the two canonical classes of hyperelliptic and trigonal curves. We present new addition formulae, derive bases for the spaces of Abelian functions and discuss the differential equations such functions satisfy.
This article is an interdisciplinary review and an on-going progress report over the last few years made by myself and collaborators in certain fundamental subjects on two major theoretic branches in mathematics and theoretical physics: algebraic geometry and quantum physics. I shall take a practical approach, concentrating more on explicit examples rather than formal developments. Topics covered are divided in three sections: (I) Algebraic geometry on two-dimensional exactly solvable statistical lattice models and its related Hamiltonians: I will report results on the algebraic geometry of ra…
Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；Università di Genova（热那亚大学）
We make progress towards characterizing the algebraic matroid of the determinantal variety defined by the minors of fixed size of a matrix of variables. Our main result is a novel family of base sets of the matroid, which characterizes the matroid in special cases. Our approach relies on the combinatorial notion of relaxed supports of linkage matching fields that we introduce, our interpretation of the problem of completing a matrix of bounded rank from a subset of its entries as a linear section problem on the Grassmannian, and a connection that we draw with a class of local coordinates on th…
This is a report of the author's talk at Kinosaki Algebraic Geometry Symposium 2018. We discuss some recent progress on the geometry of thin exceptional sets in Manin's Conjecture.
