We study families of rational curves on irreducible holomorphic symplectic varieties. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a sufficiently ample linear system on a holomorphic symplectic variety of $K3^{[n]}$-type to contain a uniruled divisor covered by rational curves of primitive class. In particular, for any fixed $n$, we show that there are only finitely many polarization types of holomorphic symplectic variety of $K3^{[n]}$-type that do not contain such a uniruled divisor. As an application, we provide a generalization of a result due to Beauville–Voisin on the Chow group of $0$-cycles on such varieties.

We study various measures of irrationality for hypersurfaces of large degree in projective space and other varieties. These include the least degree of a rational covering of projective space, and the minimal gonality of a covering family of curves. The theme is that positivity properties of canonical bundles lead to lower bounds on these invariants. In particular, we prove that if $X\subseteq \mathbf{P}^{n+1}$ is a very general smooth hypersurface of dimension $n$ and degree $d\geqslant 2n+1$, then any dominant rational mapping $f:X{\dashrightarrow}\mathbf{P}^{n}$ must have degree at least $d-1$. We also propose a number of open problems, and we show how our methods lead to simple new proofs of results of Ran and Beheshti–Eisenbud concerning varieties of multi-secant lines.

Let $X$ be a smooth complex projective variety, and let $H\,\in \,\text{Pic}\left( X \right)$ be an ample line bundle. Assume that $X$ is covered by rational curves with degree one with respect to $H$ and with anticanonical degree greater than or equal to $\left( \dim\,X\,-\,1 \right)/2$. We prove that there is a covering family of such curves whose numerical class spans an extremal ray in the cone of curves $\text{NE}\left( X \right)$.

Let $F$ be a divisor on the blow-up $X$ of ${{\mathbf{P}}^{2}}$ at $r$ general points ${{p}_{1}},...,{{p}_{r}}$ and let $L$ be the total transform of a line on ${{\mathbf{P}}^{2}}$. An approach is presented for reducing the computation of the dimension of the cokernel of the natural map ${{\mu }_{F}}:\Gamma ({{\mathcal{O}}_{_{X}}}(F))\otimes \Gamma ({{\mathcal{O}}_{_{X}}}(L))\to \Gamma ({{\mathcal{O}}_{_{X}}}(F)\otimes {{\mathcal{O}}_{_{X}}}(L))$ to the case that $F$ is ample. As an application, a formula for the dimension of the cokernel of ${{\mu }_{_{F}}}$ is obtained when $r\,=\,7$, completely solving the problem of determining the modules in minimal free resolutions of fat point subschemes ${{m}_{1}}\,{{p}_{1}}\,+\,\cdot \cdot \cdot \,+\,{{m}_{7}}\,{{p}_{7}}\,\subset \,{{\mathbf{P}}^{2}}$. All results hold for an arbitrary algebraically closed ground field $k$.

The main topic of this paper is to give characterizations of geometric properties of O-dimensional subschemes in terms of the algebraic structure of the canonical module of their projective coordinate ring. We characterize Cayley- Bacharach, (higher order) uniform position, linearly and higher order general position properties, and derive inequalities for the Hilbert functions of such schemes. Finally we relate the structure of the canonical module to properties of the minimal free resolution of X.