Green's conjecture on graded Betti numbers of curves

At least 27 years old · documented by

Let XX be a curve of genus gg. For a divisor DD on XX of degree dd, let gdrg_d^r denote a subspace of the Riemann–Roch space L(D)L(D) of dimension r+1r+1, and let βp,2\beta_{p,2} be the corresponding graded Betti number. Green's conjecture. One has βp,2≠0\beta_{p,2}\neq 0 if and only if there exists a divisor DD on XX of degree dd such that a subspace gdrg_d^r of L(D)L(D) satisfies d≤g−1d\leq g-1, r=ℓ(D)−1≥1r=\ell(D)-1\geq 1, and d−2r≤pd-2r\leq p. This conjecture relates the graded Betti numbers of a curve to the existence of linear series such as a g41g_4^1, and is used in studying the complex gonality of modular curves. The source does not provide enough information here to determine whether the conjecture is open or resolved.

References

Primary source

Petar Orlić, “Tetragonal modular quotients of X_0(N)”, arXiv:2511.13230 (2025).

Additional references

27 papers in this index state this conjecture (1998–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2510.22291, arXiv:2510.01908, arXiv:2407.14512, arXiv:2404.08014, arXiv:2311.09955, arXiv:2207.11650, arXiv:1912.05998, arXiv:1804.08011, arXiv:1803.10481, arXiv:1711.04463, arXiv:1703.10203, arXiv:1703.08056, and 14 more.

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