English

Homogeneous quasi-translations in dimension 5

Algebraic Geometry 2017-10-19 v3

Abstract

We give a proof in modern language of the following result by Paul Gordan and Max N\"other: a homogeneous quasi-translation in dimension 55 without linear invariants would be linearly conjugate to another such quasi-translation x+Hx + H, for which H5H_5 is algebraically independent over C\mathbb C of H1,H2,H3,H4H_1, H_2, H_3, H_4. Just like Gordan and N\"other, we apply this result to classify all homogeneous polynomials hh in 55 indeterminates from which the Hessian determinant is zero. Others claim to have reproved 'the result of Gordan and N\"other in P4\mathbb P^4' as well, but some of them assume that hh is irreducible, which Gordan and N\"other did not. Furthermore, they do not use the above result about homogeneous quasi-translations in dimension 55 for their classifications. (There is however one paper which could use this result very well, to fix a gap caused by an error.) We derive some other properties which HH would have. One of them is that degH15{\rm deg}\, H \ge 15, for which we give a proof which is less computational than another proof of it by Dayan Liu. Furthermore, we show that the Zariski closure of the image of HH would be an irreducible component of V(H)V(H), and prove that every other irreducible component of V(H)V(H) would be a 33-dimensional linear subspace of C5\mathbb C^5 which contains the fifth standard basis unit vector.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.04845,
  title  = {Homogeneous quasi-translations in dimension 5},
  author = {Michiel de Bondt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.04845},
  year   = {2017}
}

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34 pages