English

Low degree polynomial equations: arithmetic, geometry and topology

alg-geom 2008-02-03 v2 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

These are the notes of my lectures at the 1996 European Congress of Mathematicians. {} Polynomials appear in mathematics frequently, and we all know from experience that low degree polynomials are easier to deal with than high degree ones. It is, however, not clear that there is a well defined class of "low degree" polynomials. For many questions, polynomials behave well if their degree is low enough, but the precise bound on the degree depends on the concrete problem. {} It turns out that there is a collection of basic questions in arithmetic, algebraic geometry and topology all of which give the same class of "low degree" polynomials. The aim of this lecture is to explain these properties and to provide a survey of the known results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.alg-geom/9607016,
  title  = {Low degree polynomial equations: arithmetic, geometry and topology},
  author = {János Kollár},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:alg-geom/9607016},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

Main changes are: some errors in sections 3.3 and 4.3 are corrected. 5.5 is newly added AMSTeX 2.1

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:42:15.538Z