This thesis addresses two closely related problems about ideals of powers of linear forms. In the first chapter, we analyze a problem from spline theory, namely to compute the dimension of the vector space of tri-variate splines on a special class of tetrahedral complexes, using ideals of powers of linear forms. By Macaulay's inverse system, this class of ideals is closely related to ideals of fat points. In the second chapter, we approach a conjecture of Postnikov and Shapiro concerning the minimal free resolutions of a class of ideals of powers of linear forms in n variables which are constructed from complete graphs on n + 1 vertices. This statement was also conjectured by Schenck in the special case of n = 3. We provide two different approaches to his conjecture. We prove the conjecture of Postnikov and Shapiro under the additional condition that certain modules are free.
Splines, fat points, free resolutions, powers of linear forms
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign