Federico Gaeta: His Last Ten Years of Mathematical Activity

Abstract

In his last ten years of mathematical activity, i.e., from 1990 to 2000, Federico Gaeta focused on Effective Methods in Algebraic Geometry (mainly Computational Invariant Theory), Combinatorics and Commutative Algebra, although his contributions in these fields were never published in journals. At the age of 70, while he was emeritus professor at the UCM, he participated in the spring semester at the IHP on Surfaces de Riemann et Fibrés Vectoriels where, after discussions with D. Eisenbud he wrote the paper A fully explicit resolution of the ideal defining N generic points in the plane. It is profusely quoted by many authors as a preprint of 1995. This paper was in fact a more explicit and computational version of an old publication of his, Sur la distribution des degrés de formes appartenant à la matrice de l’ideal homogène attaché à un groupe de N points génériques du plan, appeared in CR. Acad. Sci. Paris in 1951.