Imposing Singular Points and Many Nodes to Curves on Surfaces

 Let S be a smooth projective surface. Here we study the conditions imposed to curves of a fixed very ample linear system by a general union of types of singularities τ when most of connected components of τ are ordinary double points. This problem is related to the existence of “good” families of curves on S with prescribed singularities, most of them being nodes, and to the regularity of their Hilbert scheme. Received 6 July 2000; in revised form 16 June 2001