In an earlier work, the authors described a mechanism for lifting monomial ideals to reduced unions of linear varieties. When the monomial ideal is Cohen–Macaulay (including Artinian), the corresponding union of linear varieties is arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay. The first main result of this paper is that if the monomial ideal is Artinian then the corresponding union is in the Gorenstein linkage class of a complete intersection (glicci). This technique has some interesting consequences. For instance, given any (d + 1)-times differentiable O-sequence H, there is a nondegenerate arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay reduced union of linear varieties with Hilbert function H which is glicci. In other words, any Hilbert function that occurs for arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay schemes in fact occurs among the glicci schemes. This is not true for licci schemes. Modifying our technique, the second main result is that any Cohen–Macaulay Borel-fixed monomial ideal is glicci. As a consequence, all arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay subschemes of projective space are glicci up to flat deformation.

Monodromy groups, i.e. the groups of isometries of the intersection lattice LX [colone] H2/torsion generated by the monodromy action of all deformation families of a given surface, have been computed by the author for any minimal elliptic surface with pg > q = 0. New and refined methods are now employed to address the cases of minimal elliptic surfaces with pg [ges ] q > 0. Thereby we get explicit families such that any isometry is in the group generated by their monodromies or does not respect the invariance of the canonical class or the spinor norm. The monodromy is also shown to act by the full symplectic group on the first homology modulo torsion.

We derive lower bounds for the rank of Picard groups of modular varieties associated with natural congruence subgroups of the orthogonal group of an even lattice of signature (2, l). As an example we consider the Siegel modular group of genus 2. The analytic part of this paper also leads to certain class number identities.

We give an explicit Dirichlet series for the generating function of the discriminants of quartic dihedral extensions of $\open Q$. From this series we deduce an asymptotic formula for the number of isomorphism classes of such quartic extensions with discriminant up to a given bound. On the other hand, by using essentially classical results of genus theory combined with elementary analytical methods such as the method of the hyperbola, we show how to compute exactly this number up to quite large bounds, and we give a table of selected values.

We deal with a divisorial contraction in dimension three which contracts its exceptional divisor to a compound A1 point. We prove that any such contraction is obtained by a suitable weighted blow-up.