$3 \times 3$ minors of catalecticants

Abstract

Secant varieties to Veronese embeddings of projective space are classical varieties whose equations are not completely understood. Minors of catalecticant matrices furnish some of their equations, and in some situations even generate their ideals. Geramita conjectured that this is the case for the secant line variety of the Veronese variety, namely that its ideal is generated by the 3x3 minors of any of the middle catalecticants. Part of this conjecture is the statement that the ideals of 3x3 minors are equal for most catalecticants, and this was known to hold set-theoretically. We prove the equality of 3x3 minors and derive Geramita's conjecture as a consequence of previous work by Kanev.