Recent work of Ein-Lazarsfeld-Smith and Hochster-Huneke raised the problem of which symbolic powers of an ideal are contained in a given ordinary power of the ideal. Bocci-Harbourne developed methods to address this problem, which involve asymptotic numerical characters of symbolic powers of the ideals. Most of the work done up to now has been done for ideals defining 0-dimensional subschemes of projective space. Here we focus on certain subschemes given by a union of lines in $\mathbb{P}^3$ which can also be viewed as points in $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1$. We also obtain results on the closely related problem, studied by Hochster and by Li-Swanson, of determining situations for which each symbolic power of an ideal is an ordinary power.

In a recent paper, F. Zanello showed that level Artinian algebras in 3 variables can fail to have the Weak Lefschetz Property (WLP), and can even fail to have unimodal Hilbert function. We show that the same is true for the Artinian reduction of reduced, level sets of points in projective 3-space. Our main goal is to begin an understanding of how the geometry of a set of points can prevent its Artinian reduction from having WLP, which in itself is a very algebraic notion. More precisely, we produce level sets of points whose Artinian reductions have socle types 3 and 4 and arbitrary socle degree $\geq 12$ (in the worst case), but fail to have WLP. We also produce a level set of points whose Artinian reduction fails to have unimodal Hilbert function; our example is based on Zanello's example. Finally, we show that a level set of points can have Artinian reduction that has WLP but fails to have the Strong Lefschetz Property. While our constructions are all based on basic double G-linkage, the implementations use very different methods.

In this article we prove some new results on projective normality, normal presentation and higher syzygies for surfaces of general type, not necessarily smooth, embedded by adjoint linear series. Some of the corollaries of more general results include: results on property $N_p$ associated to $K_S \otimes B^{\otimes n}$ where $B$ is base-point free and ample divisor with $B\otimes K^*$ {\it nef}, results for pluricanonical linear systems and results giving effective bounds for adjoint linear series associated to ample bundles. Examples in the last section show that the results are optimal.

In this paper we consider linear systems of $\mathbb{P}^2$ with all but one of the base points of multiplicity $5$. We give an explicit way to evaluate the dimensions of such systems.

We characterize embeddability of algebraic varieties into smooth toric varieties and prevarieties. Our embedding results hold also in an equivariant context and thus generalize a well-known embedding theorem of Sumihiro on quasiprojective $G$-varieties. The main idea is to reduce the embedding problem to the affine case. This is done by constructing equivariant affine conoids, a tool which extends the concept of an equivariant affine cone over a projective $G$-variety to a more general framework.

Let $X$ be a smooth projective surface over the complex number field and let $L$ be a nef-big divisor on $X$. Here we consider the following conjecture; If the Kodaira dimension $\kappa(X)\geq 0$, then $K_{X}L\geq 2q(X)-4$, where $q(X)$ is the irregularity of $X$. In this paper, we prove that this conjecture is true if (1) the case in which $\kappa(X)=0$ or $1$, (2) the case in which $\kappa(X)=2$ and $h^{0}(L)\geq 2$, or (3) the case in which $\kappa(X)=2$, $X$ is minimal, $h^{0}(L)=1$, and $L$ satisfies some conditions.