On Bézout inequalities for non-homogeneous polynomial ideals (Q2028993)

The authors study the notion of degree for a non-homogeneous polynomial ideal. Degree of a homogenous polynomial ideal is defined in terms of its Hilbert polynomial and has been well-studied. The Hilbert function does not detect the embedded components of an ideal and this makes it unfeasible to have the Bézout inequality in terms of the degrees of ideals. In this paper, in Section 2, a definition of the degree of a non-homogeneous ideal is given in the natural way, by homogenising the ideal and then using the definition of the degree for homogeneous ideals. However, this definition suffers from the same issue as the classic definition of degree of homogeneous ideals. Section three of the article gives an alternative intrinsic (and workable) definition of the degree of a non-homogeneous ideal, based on a generic sequence of linear polynomials. For equi-dimensional ideals, this new definition has been shown to agree with the definition of the degree of an ideal via homogenisation. The results of Section 3 lead to arguably the main result of the article, which is an affine version of the Bézout inequality. In particular, it gives a bound on the degree of an ideal, based on the degree of the generators of the ideal.