Syzygies of projective surfaces: an overview

Abstract

This is a survey article concerning the syzygies of projective smooth varieties, with particular emphasis on the surface case. It describes some special cases of surfaces in which the so-called Mukai conjecture holds (namely, if KX is the canonical bundle and A is an ample line bundle then the conjecture says that KX+mA satisfies the Np-property for m≥p+4). In higher dimension the case of Calabi-Yau threefolds and the example of the Veronese embedding of Pn are considered.