THE FACTORIAL CONJECTURE AND IMAGES OF LOCALLY NILPOTENT DERIVATIONS

Abstract

The factorial conjecture was proposed by van den Essen et al. [‘On the image conjecture’, J. Algebra 340(1) (2011), 211–224] to study the image conjecture, which arose from the Jacobian conjecture. We show that the factorial conjecture holds for all homogeneous polynomials in two variables. We also give a variation of the result and use it to show that the image of any linear locally nilpotent derivation of $\mathbb{C}[x,y,z]$ is a Mathieu–Zhao subspace.