In this paper we study the degrees of irrationality of hypersurfaces of large degree in a complex projective variety. We show that the maps computing the degrees of irrationality of these hypersurfaces factor through rational fibrations of the ambient variety. As a consequence, we give tight bounds on the degree of irrationality of these hypersurfaces in terms of a new invariant of independent interest: the minimal fibering degree of a projective variety with respect to an effective divisor. As a corollary we show that the degree of irrationality of a complete intersection of sufficiently large and unbalanced degrees is roughly the product of the degrees. This gives a partial answer to a question of Bastianelli, De Poi, Ein, Lazarsfeld, and the third author.

In this paper, we examine linear conditions on finite sets of points in projective space implied by the Cayley–Bacharach condition. In particular, by bounding the number of points satisfying the Cayley–Bacharach condition, we force them to lie on unions of low-dimensional linear spaces. These results are motivated by investigations into degrees of irrationality of complete intersections, which are controlled by minimum-degree rational maps to projective space. As an application of our main theorem, we describe the fibers of such maps for certain complete intersections of codimension two.

The purpose of this paper is to compute the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of sufficiently high degree in various Fano varieties: quadrics, Grassmannians, products of projective space, cubic threefolds, cubic fourfolds, and complete intersection threefolds of type (2,2). This extends the techniques of Bastianelli, De Poi, Ein, Lazarsfeld, and the second author who computed the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of sufficiently high degree in projective space. A theme in the paper is that the fibers of low degree rational maps from the hypersurfaces to projective space tend to lie on curves of low degree contained in the Fano varieties. This allows us to study these maps by studying the geometry of curves in these Fano varieties.

The purpose of this paper is to show that for a complete intersection curve $C$ in projective space (other than a few stated exceptions), any morphism $f: C \to \mathbb{P}^r$ satisfying $\text{deg}\, f^*\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}^r}(1) <\text{deg}\, C$ is obtained by projection from a linear space. In particular, we obtain bounds on the gonality of such curves and compute the gonality of general complete intersection curves. We also prove a special case of one of the well-known Cayley-Bacharach conjectures posed by Eisenbud, Green, and Harris.

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 $X\subseteq \mathbf{P}^{n+1}$ is a very general smooth hypersurface of dimension $n$ and degree $d\geqslant 2n+1$ , then any dominant rational mapping $f:X{\dashrightarrow}\mathbf{P}^{n}$ 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.

In this paper, we show that the secant variety to a smooth projective variety embedded by a sufficiently positive line bundle is normal. As an application, we deduce that the secant variety to a general canonical curve of genus at least 7 is normal.

The purpose of this paper is to give a simple geometric construction of ideals whose Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity is large compared to the generating degree. Moreover, our ideals have the property that the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity is revealed as late in the resolution as desired.

This paper gives a basic introduction to modern algebraic geometry. The goal of this paper is to present the basic concepts of algebraic geometry, in particular affine schemes and sheaf theory, in such a way that they are more accessible to a student with a background in commutative algebra and basic algebraic curves or classical algebraic geometry. This paper is based on introductions to the subject by Robin Hartshorne, Qing Liu, and David Eisenbud and Joe Harris, but provides more rudimentary explanations as well as original proofs and numerous original examples.