Journal of Algebra 230, 127᎐173Ž. 2000 doi:10.1006rjabr.1999.7940, available online at http:rrwww.idealibrary.com on The Projective Geometry of the Gale Transform David Eisenbud1 Department of Mathematics, Uni¨ersity of California, Berkeley, California 94720 E-mail:
[email protected] and Sorin Popescu Department of Mathematics, Columbia Uni¨ersity, New York, New York 10027 E-mail:
[email protected] Communicated by Craig Huneke Received July 23, 1998 The Gale transform, an involution on sets of points in projective space, appears in a multitude of guises and in subjects as diverse as optimization, coding theory, theta functions, and recently in our proof that certain general sets of points fail to satisfy the minimal free resolution conjectureŽ see Eisenbud and Popescu, 1999, In¨ent. Math. 136, 419᎐449. In this paper we reexamine the Gale transform in the light of modern algebraic geometry. We give a more general definition in the context of finiteŽ. locally Gorenstein subschemes. We put in modern form a number of the more remarkable examples discovered in the past, and we add new constructions and connections to other areas of algebraic geometry. We generalize Goppa's theorem in coding theory and we give new applications to Castelnuovo theory. We also give references to classical and modern sources. ᮊ 2000 Academic Press CONTENTS I. The Gale transform 1. History 2. The scheme-theoretic definition 3. A generalized Goppa theorem 1 Both authors are grateful to the NSF for support during the preparation of this work. It was in joint work with David Buchsbaum that the first author first became familiar with the notion of a Gorenstein ring.