Ideals of powers and powers of ideals. Intersecting algebra, geometry, and combinatorics (Q2181150)

The monograph under review is based on lectures (lessons) delivered by the authors during the PRAGMATIC School in 2017 entitled \textit{Ideals of Powers and Powers of Ideals}. This is a very interesting monograph providing a fast introduction to different fields of research devoted to modern aspects and develompents of commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, combinatorics, etc. In order to give you some feeling about constellations of variations, there was a series of lectures devoted to the classical Waring problem of writing a homogeneous polynomial as a minimal sum of powers of linear homogeneous polynomials, or studing algebro-combinatorial properties of edge ideals associated with graphs, especially in the context of the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity. From a geometric point of view, the reader is invited to study properties of symbolic powers of ideals defining interesting (projective) subvarieties or to find meaningful examples of the so-called unexpected hypersurfaces (which turned out to be a hot topic of research). The monograph is divided into six parts. The first part is devoted to the associated primes of ideals and two important notions, namely the stability index of an ideal and the persistence property. The second part is devoted to the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of homogeneous ideals and their powers, mostly in the context of symbolic and ordinary powers of edge ideals associated with graphs. The third part is devoted to the containment problem for symbolic and ordinary powers of homogeneous ideals, mostly focusing on squarefree monomial ideals and ideals defining fat point schemes in the projective spaces. The fourth part is focused on the recently introduced notion of unexpected curves and its relation with the SHGH conjecture (which is one of the main motivations). In the fifth part we can learn about Waring decompositions for homogeneous polynomials. Specifically, Sylvester algorithm for binary forms with a connection to Strassen's conjecture is presented. In the last chapter the authors summed up research problems / research project with interesting questions proposed to the participants of the school -- reading this part please bear in mind that some of those questions were investigated and solved, at least partially. In the very last section entitled \textit{The art of research} the authors collect very useful suggestions and hints (directed mostly to young researchers, but according to reviewer's view this section has a timeless dimension) how to approach and conduct research projects. As we can read in the monograph, the 2017 edition of PRAGMATIC was very fruitful leading to several important research papers published in leading research journals related to the subject of the school. As a member of the mathematical community I really hope that PRAGMATIC schools will show up on the map of scientific events as soon as it will be possible since their role for the mathematical development in widely understood algebra and geometry is priceless.