Linear syzygies and birational combinatorics (Q860146)

``Birational combinatorics'' is (for the authors) the theory of characteristic free rational maps from projective spaces defined by monomials. Their paper proves that this is not just propaganda: they give effective criteria. To get characteristic-free criteria they use the formal (not the ordinary) Jacobian matrix. An extension of integral domains is said to be birational if it induces the identity of the quotient fields. They give a criterion for birationality for the extension \(R[F] \subset R^{(d)}\), where \(R\) is a polynomial ring, \(F\) a set of monomials and \(R^{(d)}\) the \(d\)-th Veronese subring of \(R\). For monomials of degree \(2\) they give a very complete picture; for instance, they connect failure of birationality, ``cohesiveness'' and the existence of enough linear syzygies.