The Chern numbers of the title are the first coefficients (after the multiplicities) of the Hilbert functions of various filtrations of ideals of a local ring (R, m). For a Noetherian (good) filtration A of m-primary ideals, the positivity and bounds for e1(A) are well-studied if R is Cohen-Macaulay, or more broadly, if R is a Buchsbaum ring or mild generalizations thereof. For arbitrary geomet...

It is shown in this paper how a solution for a combinatorial problem obtained from applying the greedy algorithm is guaranteed to be optimal for those instances of the problem that, under an appropriate algebraic representation, satisfy the Cohen-Macaulay property known for rings and modules in Commutative Algebra. The choice of representation for the instances of a given combinatorial problem ...

This thesis is largely a consolidation of parts of lectures given by Yoshino, Y. at Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1987 (cf. [17]). We aim to investigate the Cohen-Macaulay modules of simple plane curve singularities. We consider such simple plane curve singularities algebraically as quotient rings R = k[[x, y]]/(f) of the formal power series ring in two variables over an algebraically closed...

The arithmetic degree, the smallest extended degree, and the homological degree are invariants that have been proposed as alternatives of the degree of a module if this module is not Cohen-Macaulay. We compare these degree functions and study their behavior when passing to the generic initial or the lexicographic submodule. This leads to various bounds and to counterexamples to a conjecture of ...