This paper concerns minimal systems of homogeneous generators (i.e., standard bases) of homogeneous ideals Z in a commutative polynomial ring K with coefficients in a field k. A basic numerical question about a standard basis B of Z is to determine its cardinality or, more generally, the number of the elements in B of degree t, for each t > 0; this number depends only on Z (and not on the choice of B) and will be denoted by v,(Z). In this paper we obtain a sharp estimate for the numbers v,(P), when P is a perfect homogeneous ideal of height 2 in K. Precisely, in (2.1) we provide upper and lower bounds for v,(P) in terms of the Hilbert function H = H(K/P, ) of K/P and of an integer /I, which ranges in an interval defined by H. Then in (3.3) we show the sharpness of these bounds: in fact we prove a more general result by exhibiting examples of ideals P (with given H and /I) having, for each degree t, one of the possible values v,(P) expected from (2.1). Finally, in (4.1) we modify the preceding examples and obtain, under certain hypotheses, radical ideals with the same properties. The preceding results offer refined versions of well known theorems. In fact, from (2.1) we obtain (cf. (2.3)) a more complete form of Dubreil’s inequalities (cf. [2, 11); moreover (3.3) and (4.1) improve, in the particular hypotheses under consideration, a classic result of Macaulay (cf. [lo, 143) and its reduced version (cf. [6, 11, 131). Finally, particular cases of our estimates in (2.1) can be found in [7, 8, 5, 121 (for points “in generic position” in the projective plane), in [ 1 ] (for “Hilbert-function-completeintersections”), and in [4] (for monomial ideals of height 2).
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