Dipartimento of Mathematics, Universitá di Roma II, Via Fontanile di Carcaricola, 00173 Rome, Italy ; Department of Mathematics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
Abstract:
In this article we address the problem of computing the dimension of the space of plane curves of degree with general points of multiplicity . A conjecture of Harbourne and Hirschowitz implies that when , the dimension is equal to the expected dimension given by the Riemann-Roch Theorem. Also, systems for which the dimension is larger than expected should have a fixed part containing a multiple -curve. We reformulate this conjecture by explicitly listing those systems which have unexpected dimension. Then we use a degeneration technique developed to show that the conjecture holds for all .