The study of free resolutions is a core and beautiful area in Commutative Algebra. The main goal of this book is to inspire the readers and develop their intuition about syzygies and Hilbert functions. Many examples are given in order to illustrate ideas and key concepts. A valuable feature of the book is the inclusion of open problems and conjectures; these provide a glimpse of exciting, and often challenging, research directions in the field. Three types of problems are presented: Conjectures, Problems, and Open-Ended Problems. The latter do not describe specific problems but point to interesting directions for exploration. The first part of the monograph contains basic background material on graded free resolutions. Further coverage of topics includes syzygies over a polynomial ring, resolutions over quotient rings, lex ideals and Hilbert functions, compression, resolutions of monomial ideals, and syzygies of toric ideals. With a clear and self-contained exposition this text is intended for advanced graduate students and postdoctorates; it will be also of interest to senior mathematicians.

The most important invariant of a topological space is its fundamental group. When this is trivial, the resulting homotopy theory is well researched and familiar. In the general case, however, homotopy theory over nontrivial fundamental groups is much more problematic and far less well understood. Syzygies and Homotopy Theory explores the problem of nonsimply connected homotopy in the first nontrivial cases and presents, for the first time, a systematic rehabilitation of Hilbert's method of syzygies in the context of non-simply connected homotopy theory. The first part of the book is theoretical, formulated to allow a general finitely presented group as a fundamental group. The innovation here is to regard syzygies as stable modules rather than minimal modules. Inevitably this forces a reconsideration of the problems of noncancellation; these are confronted in the second, practical, part of the book. In particular, the second part of the book considers how the theory works out in detail for the specific examples Fn ́F where Fn is a free group of rank n and F is finite. Another innovation is to parametrize the first syzygy in terms of the more familiar class of stably free modules. Furthermore, detailed description of these stably free modules is effected by a suitable modification of the method of Milnor squares. The theory developed within this book has potential applications in various branches of algebra, including homological algebra, ring theory and K-theory. Syzygies and Homotopy Theory will be of interest to researchers and also to graduate students with a background in algebra and algebraic topology.

First textbook-level account of basic examples and techniques in this area. Suitable for self-study by a reader who knows a little commutative algebra and algebraic geometry already. David Eisenbud is a well-known mathematician and current president of the American Mathematical Society, as well as a successful Springer author.

The central theme of this book is an exposition of the geometric technique of calculating syzygies. It is written from a point of view of commutative algebra, and without assuming any knowledge of representation theory the calculation of syzygies of determinantal varieties is explained. The starting point is a definition of Schur functors, and these are discussed from both an algebraic and geometric point of view. Then a chapter on various versions of Bott's Theorem leads on to a careful explanation of the technique itself, based on a description of the direct image of a Koszul complex. Applications to determinantal varieties follow, plus there are also chapters on applications of the technique to rank varieties for symmetric and skew symmetric tensors of arbitrary degree, closures of conjugacy classes of nilpotent matrices, discriminants and resultants. Numerous exercises are included to give the reader insight into how to apply this important method.

The American Journal of Mathematics publishes research papers and articles of broad appeal covering the major areas of contemporary mathematics.