Betti numbers of almost complete intersections (Q1584485)

In this paper, the author investigates the minimal free resolutions of cyclic modules \(R/I\), where \(I\) is an almost complete intersection in the local ring \(R\). In the first section, exploiting a kind of ``almost duality'' for almost complete intersections, he shows that the conjectured lower bounds hold for at least half of the Betti numbers and at least half of the ranks and he establishes the conjectured bound on the sum of the Betti numbers. -- In the second section he introduces combinatorial arguments which rule out the existence of certain resolutions. These techniques depend on some elementary counting arguments and use general position and linkage theory. -- In the last section a list of some open problems is presented.