Hilbert series and Hilbert polynomial
In commutative algebra, the Hilbert function, the Hilbert polynomial, and the Hilbert series of a graded commutative algebra finitely generated over a field are three strongly related notions which measure the growth of the dimension of the homogeneous components of the algebra.
These notions have been extended to filtered algebras, and graded or filtered modules over these algebras, as well as to coherent sheaves over projective schemes.
The typical situations where these notions are used are the following:
- The quotient by a homogeneous ideal of a multivariate polynomial ring, graded by the total degree.
- The quotient by an ideal of a multivariate polynomial ring, filtered by the total degree.
- The filtration of a local ring by the powers of its maximal ideal. In this case the Hilbert polynomial is called the Hilbert–Samuel polynomial.
The Hilbert polynomial and Hilbert series are important in computational algebraic geometry, as they are the easiest known way for computing the dimension and the degree of an algebraic variety defined by explicit polynomial equations. In addition, they provide useful invariants for families of algebraic varieties because a flat family has the same Hilbert polynomial over any closed point. This is used in the construction of the Hilbert scheme and Quot scheme.
Definitions and main properties
Consider a finitely generated graded commutative algebra over a field, which is finitely generated by elements of positive degree. This means thatand that.
The Hilbert function
maps the integer onto the dimension of the -vector space. The Hilbert series, which is called Hilbert–Poincaré series in the more general setting of graded vector spaces, is the formal series
If is generated by homogeneous elements of positive degrees, then the sum of the Hilbert series is a rational fraction
where is a polynomial with integer coefficients.
If is generated by elements of degree 1 then the sum of the Hilbert series may be rewritten as
where is a polynomial with integer coefficients, and is the Krull dimension of.
In this case the series expansion of this rational fraction is
where
is the binomial coefficient for and is 0 otherwise.
If
the coefficient of in is thus
For the term of index in this sum is a polynomial in of degree with leading coefficient This shows that there exists a unique polynomial with rational coefficients which is equal to for large enough. This polynomial is the Hilbert polynomial, and has the form
The least such that for is called the Hilbert regularity. It may be lower than.
The Hilbert polynomial is a numerical polynomial, since the dimensions are integers, but the polynomial almost never has integer coefficients.
All these definitions may be extended to finitely generated graded modules over, with the only difference that a factor appears in the Hilbert series, where is the minimal degree of the generators of the module, which may be negative.
The Hilbert function, the Hilbert series and the Hilbert polynomial of a filtered algebra are those of the associated graded algebra.
The Hilbert polynomial of a projective variety in is defined as the Hilbert polynomial of the homogeneous coordinate ring of.
Graded algebra and polynomial rings
Polynomial rings and their quotients by homogeneous ideals are typical graded algebras. Conversely, if is a graded algebra generated over the field by homogeneous elements of degree 1, then the map which sends onto defines an homomorphism of graded rings from onto. Its kernel is a homogeneous ideal and this defines an isomorphism of graded algebra between and.Thus, the graded algebras generated by elements of degree 1 are exactly, up to an isomorphism, the quotients of polynomial rings by homogeneous ideals. Therefore, the remainder of this article will be restricted to the quotients of polynomial rings by ideals.
Properties of Hilbert series
Additivity
Hilbert series and Hilbert polynomial are additive relatively to exact sequences. More precisely, ifis an exact sequence of graded or filtered modules, then we have
and
This follows immediately from the same property for the dimension of vector spaces.
Quotient by a non-zero divisor
Let be a graded algebra and a homogeneous element of degree in which is not a zero divisor. Then we haveIt follows from the additivity on the exact sequence
where the arrow labeled is the multiplication by, and is the graded module which is obtained from by shifting the degrees by, in order that the multiplication by has degree 0. This implies that
Hilbert series and Hilbert polynomial of a polynomial ring
The Hilbert series of the polynomial ring in indeterminates isIt follows that the Hilbert polynomial is
The proof that the Hilbert series has this simple form is obtained by applying recursively the previous formula for the quotient by a non zero divisor and remarking that
Shape of the Hilbert series and dimension
A graded algebra generated by homogeneous elements of degree 1 has Krull dimension zero if the maximal homogeneous ideal, that is the ideal generated by the homogeneous elements of degree 1, is nilpotent. This implies that the dimension of as a -vector space is finite and the Hilbert series of is a polynomial such that is equal to the dimension of as a -vector space.If the Krull dimension of is positive, there is a homogeneous element of degree one which is not a zero divisor. The Krull dimension of is the Krull dimension of minus one.
The additivity of Hilbert series shows that. Iterating this a number of times equal to the Krull dimension of, we get eventually an algebra of dimension 0 whose Hilbert series is a polynomial. This show that the Hilbert series of is
where the polynomial is such that and is the Krull dimension of.
This formula for the Hilbert series implies that the degree of the Hilbert polynomial is, and that its leading coefficient is.
Degree of a projective variety and Bézout's theorem
The Hilbert series allows us to compute the degree of an algebraic variety as the value at 1 of the numerator of the Hilbert series. This provides also a rather simple proof of Bézout's theorem.For showing the relationship between the degree of a projective algebraic set and the Hilbert series, consider an projective algebraic set, defined as the set of the zeros of a homogeneous ideal, where is a field, and let be the ring of the regular functions on the algebraic set.
In this section, one does not need irreducibility of algebraic sets nor primality of ideals. Also, as Hilbert series are not changed by extending the field of coefficients, the field is supposed, without loss of generality, to be algebraically closed.
The dimension of is equal to the Krull dimension minus one of, and the degree of is the number of points of intersection, counted with multiplicities, of with the intersection of hyperplanes in general position. This implies the existence, in, of a regular sequence of homogeneous polynomials of degree one. The definition of a regular sequence implies the existence of exact sequences
for This implies that
where is the numerator of the Hilbert series of.
The ring has Krull dimension one, and is the ring of regular functions of a projective algebraic set of dimension 0 consisting of a finite number of points, which may be multiple points. As belongs to a regular sequence, none of these points belong to the hyperplane of equation The complement of this hyperplane is an affine space that contains This makes an affine algebraic set, which has as its ring of regular functions. The linear polynomial is not a zero divisor in and one has thus an exact sequence
which implies that
Here we are using [|Hilbert series of filtered algebras], and the fact that the Hilbert series of a graded algebra is also its Hilbert series as filtered algebra.
Thus is an Artinian ring, which is a -vector space of dimension, and Jordan–Hölder theorem may be used for proving that is the degree of the algebraic set. In fact, the multiplicity of a point is the number of occurrences of the corresponding maximal ideal in a composition series.
For proving Bézout's theorem, one may proceed similarly. If is a homogeneous polynomial of degree, which is not a zero divisor in, the exact sequence
shows that
Looking on the numerators this proves the following generalization of Bézout's theorem:
In a more geometrical form, this may restated as:
The usual Bézout's theorem is easily deduced by starting from a hypersurface, and intersecting it with other hypersurfaces, one after the other.
Complete intersection
A projective algebraic set is a complete intersection if its defining ideal is generated by a regular sequence. In this case, there is a simple explicit formula for the Hilbert series.Let be homogeneous polynomials in, of respective degrees Setting one has the following exact sequences
The additivity of Hilbert series implies thus
A simple recursion gives
This shows that the complete intersection defined by a regular sequence of polynomials has a codimension of, and that its degree is the product of the degrees of the polynomials in the sequence.
Relation with free resolutions
Every graded module over a graded regular ring has a graded free resolution, meaning there exists an exact sequencewhere the are graded free modules, and the arrows are graded linear maps of degree zero.
The additivity of Hilbert series implies that
If is a polynomial ring, and if one knows the degrees of the basis elements of the then the formulas of the preceding sections allow deducing from In fact, these formulas imply that, if a graded free module has a basis of homogeneous elements of degrees then its Hilbert series is
These formulas may be viewed as a way for computing Hilbert series. This is rarely the case, as, with the known algorithms, the computation of the Hilbert series and the computation of a free resolution start from the same Gröbner basis, from which the Hilbert series may be directly computed with a computational complexity which is not higher than that the complexity of the computation of the free resolution.
Computation of Hilbert series and Hilbert polynomial
The Hilbert polynomial is easily deducible from the Hilbert series. This section describes how the Hilbert series may be computed in the case of a quotient of a polynomial ring, filtered or graded by the total degree.Thus let K a field, be a polynomial ring and I be an ideal in R. Let H be the homogeneous ideal generated by the homogeneous parts of highest degree of the elements of I. If I is homogeneous, then H=I. Finally let B be a Gröbner basis of I for a monomial ordering refining the total degree partial ordering and G the ideal generated by the leading monomials of the elements of B.
The computation of the Hilbert series is based on the fact that the filtered algebra R/I and the graded algebras R/H and R/G have the same Hilbert series.
Thus the computation of the Hilbert series is reduced, through the computation of a Gröbner basis, to the same problem for an ideal generated by monomials, which is usually much easier than the computation of the Gröbner basis. The computational complexity of the whole computation depends mainly on the regularity, which is the degree of the numerator of the Hilbert series. In fact the Gröbner basis may be computed by linear algebra over the polynomials of degree bounded by the regularity.
The computation of Hilbert series and Hilbert polynomials are available in most computer algebra systems. For example in both Maple and Magma these functions are named HilbertSeries and HilbertPolynomial.
Generalization to coherent sheaves
In algebraic geometry, graded rings generated by elements of degree 1 produce projective schemes by Proj construction while finitely generated graded modules correspond to coherent sheaves. If is a coherent sheaf over a projective scheme X, we define the Hilbert polynomial of as a function, where χ is the Euler characteristic of coherent sheaf, and a Serre twist. The Euler characteristic in this case is a well-defined number by Grothendieck's finiteness theorem.This function is indeed a polynomial. For large m it agrees with dim by Serre's vanishing theorem. If M is a finitely generated graded module and the associated coherent sheaf the two definitions of Hilbert polynomial agree.