Rees valuations (Q5891059)

The authors study dicritical divisors and Rees valuations. The notion of dicritical divisor appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, in the study of isolated singularities of complex planar differential equations [\textit{H. Dulac}, Journ. de Math. (6) 2, 381--402 (1906; JFM 37.0336.02)]. The analytical (topological) concept of dicritical divisors was developed by several authors and Abhyankar algebracized this concept. First, the authors are taking a concrete hypersurface case and giving an explicit description of the dicritical divisors of the maximal ideal by using affine QDTs. Let \(d,m,h\) be positive integers with \(m>h\). Let \(X_1,\dots,X_d,Z\) be indeterminates over a field \(K\), and let \[ G=G(X_1,\dots,X_d,Z)=Z^m+\sum_{h\leqslant i\leqslant m-1}G_i\in C=K[X_1,\dots,X_d,Z] \] be irreducible with \(G_i=G(X_1,\dots,X_d,Z)\in C\) such that depending on \(i\), \(G_i=0\) or \(G_i\) is a homogenous polynomial of degree \(i\). Let \(R\) be the local ring of the origin \((0,\dots,0)\) on the hypersurface \(G=0\), and let \(M\) be the maximal ideal \(M(R)\) in \(R\). Taking some of the assumptions, the authors show that \(\mathfrak{D}(R,M)\) (the dicritical set) consists of \(h\) distinct DVRs \(V_1,\dots, V_h\). Let \(R\) be a normal noetherian ring and let \(I\) be a nonzero nonunit normal ideal in \(R\). The authors show that the dicriticals are in a bijective correspondence with the height zero primes of \(\text{grad}(R,I)\) under assumption that \(\text{grad}(R,I)\) is reduced. In the last section, the authors investigate some properties of a contact number. The notion of a contact number was introduced by \textit{S. S. Abhyankar} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 139, No. 9, 3067--3082 (2011; Zbl 1227.14004)].